The Pivotal Generation: Why We Have a Moral Responsibility to Slow Climate Change Right Now 9780691226255

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TH E P IVOTAL G E N E R ATI O N

The Pivotal Generation Why We Have a Moral Responsibility to Slow Climate Change Right Now Henry Shue

P R I N C E ­T O N U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S P R I N C E ­T O N A N D OX F O R D

Copyright © 2021 by Prince­ton University Press Prince­ton University Press is committed to the protection of copyright and the intellectual property our authors entrust to us. Copyright promotes the pro­gress and integrity of knowledge. Thank you for supporting ­free speech and the global exchange of ideas by purchasing an authorized edition of this book. If you wish to reproduce or distribute any part of it in any form, please obtain permission. Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to permissions@press​.­princeton​.­edu Published by Prince­ton University Press 41 William Street, Prince­ton, New Jersey 08540 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press​.­princeton​.­edu All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Shue, Henry, author. Title: The pivotal generation : why we have a moral responsibility to slow climate change right now / Henry Shue. Description: Prince­ton : Prince­ton University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021013539 (print) | LCCN 2021013540 (ebook) | ISBN 9780691226248 (hardback ; acid-­free paper) | ISBN 9780691226255 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Climate change mitigation. | Environmental policy—­United States. | Environmental ethics. | Climatic changes—­Forecasting. Classification: LCC TD171.75 .S58 2021 (print) | LCC TD171.75 (ebook) | DDC 363.738/7460973—­dc23 LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2021013539 LC ebook rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2021013540 Editorial: Rob Tempio and Matt Rohal Production Editorial: Natalie Baan Jacket Design: Pamela L. Schnitter Production: Erin Suydam Publicity: Alyssa Sanford and Amy Stewart Jacket art: Shutterstock This book has been composed in Adobe Text and Gotham Printed on acid-­free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca 10 ​9 ​8 ​7 ​6 ​5 ​4 ​3 ​2 ​1

For the Augusta County Alliance (now, Alliance for the Shenandoah Valley) and all the other grassroots Davids who slew the dangerous Goliath that would have been the Atlantic Coast Pipeline Dif­fer­ent motives, one goal Co­ali­tion politics

CONTENTS

Preface ix 1

The Pivotal Generation: “You Are ­Here”  1 Illusions of Separation  2 The Context That Makes Us Pivotal  5 Arbitrary Demands?  8 Unique Historical Period, Incomparable Moral Responsibility  10 Heavier Burdens  13 Unlimited Threats  17 Tipping Points  23 Conclusion  26

2

The Presence of the Past  28 Owning Our National Past  31 Disowning Our National Past  34 The Pure Fairness Argument  36 The Wrong ful Imposition Arguments  43 Conclusion  54

3

Engagement across Distance and Engagement across Time  58 The Phenomenology of Agency  60 The Danger of Transition  61 vii

viii Co nte nt s

Con­temporary “Strangers” and the Affordability of Alternative Energy  66 ­Future “Strangers” and Tipping Points  75 The Date-­of-­Last-­Opportunity to Prevent Disaster  77 Further Reasons? Past Sacrifice, Hope, and Continuity  82 Conclusion  87 4

Are Th ­ ere Second Chances on Climate Change?  89 Fix It L ­ ater?  89 Contrasting Purposes of CO2 Removal  94 Scaling Up in Time?  98 Bequeathing Risks  103 The Reversible and the Irreversible  111

5

Taking Control of Our Legacy  117 Power­ful Enemies, Allied Masses  117 Planning the “Final Harvest”: Deceptive Delay  124 Enabling the “Final Harvest”: Banks’ BAU  128 Preventing the “Final Harvest”: The Active Many vs. the Ruthless Few  130 Acknowl­edgments  137 Appendix on In­equality  139 Notes 143 Index 175

PREFACE

This book is intended primarily for US citizens who would like to think systematically about our responsibility, both simply as ­humans and also specifically as Americans, to confront climate change. Many of the arguments apply equally well to ­people in other affluent nations, but in order to stay concrete and not lapse into vague platitudes, I have mostly stuck to this one case of my own country. B ­ ecause systematic thought about responsibility requires venturing into po­liti­cal and ethical philosophy, I hope the book w ­ ill interest phi­los­o­phers and students of philosophy without being inaccessible to nonphi­los­o­phers. I intend this book to be practical philosophy. So, on the one hand, I have avoided technical philosophical issues with no implications for how to act. On the other hand, I have waded into crucial scientific and po­liti­cal judgments to the best of my ­limited ability. Philosophy can be practical only by being empirically embedded, ­because right action in the world can never be specified purely by conceptual arguments. Around 1990 at Cornell University, Duane Chapman insisted that I ­ought to look into the ethical issues about climate change; I am still wrestling with them. Andy Hurrell issued the invitation that led me to write “The Unavoidability of Justice” (1992), and Fred Aman invited what became “Subsistence Emissions and Luxury Emissions” (1993). Over the years, I have learned and received encouragement from Steve Gardiner, Dale Jamieson, Darrel Moellendorf, Tim Hayward, Liz Cripps, Anja Karnein, and Simon Caney. Rob Tempio at Prince­ton University Press suggested this book, and Catriona McKinnon gave the manuscript ix

x P r e fac e

an invaluably constructive critique. I also learned from another anonymous reader for the Press. For the most conversations over the most years by far, I am grateful to Vivienne, who has continued not merely to tolerate but strongly to support this work during what we quizzically and smilingly call our “retirement.” Witney, ­England January 2021

TH E P IVOTAL G E N E R ATI O N

1 The Pivotal Generation “ YOU ARE ­H ERE”

The crucial role we fill, as moral beings, is as members of a cross-­generational community, a community of beings who look before and ­after, who interpret the past in the light of the pre­sent, who see the ­future as growing out of the past, who see themselves as members of enduring families, nations, cultures, traditions.1 We continue to live on a stage where t­ here is nothing but the pre­sent. Past and f­ uture alike have dissolved into a perpetual now, leaving us imprisoned in a moment without links backwards or forwards.2 ­ very de­cade is consequential in its own way, but the E twenty-­twenties ­will be consequential in a more or less permanent way. Global CO2 emissions are now so high—in 2019, they hit a new rec­ord of forty-­three billion metric tons—­that ten more years of the same ­will be nothing short of cataclysmic.3

1

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Illusions of Separation

Climate change is a ­matter of time. As we ordinarily think of time, now is the critical time for vigorous action to try to impose some limit on climate change. H ­ uman action or inaction during the next de­cade or so is likely to determine how severe climate change fi­nally becomes. It is still—­only barely—­pos­si­ble for us to act just in time to prevent the worst in spite of the fact that invaluable time has been thrown away by callous and corrupt po­liti­cal leaders who have largely wasted the last three de­cades since the Framework Convention on Climate Change was a­ dopted with much fanfare in 1992 and by the executives in the fossil-­fuel industry who have deceived and tricked the public and corrupted our politics so that they can continue business-­as-­usual for as long as pos­si­ble.4 That we still have the opportunity to act just in time makes us h ­ ere and now the most impor­tant generation of h ­ umans to have lived with regard to the conditions of life on this planet for us and all the other species. We can be the “greatest generation” for the climate strug­gle or the miserably self-­preoccupied and easily manipulated ones who failed to rise to the occasion and whom ­future generations ­will recall, if at all, with contempt. “Time is of the essence,” as the ­lawyers phrase it in the contracts. The time is now, and the time is short. So ­those of us alive now are the pivotal generation in ­human history for the fate of our planet’s livability. Yet climate change is also a ­matter of time in a deeper, more philosophically in­ter­est­ing and morally consequential re­spect. Ordinarily, we divide time into past, pre­sent, and f­ uture, taking the ­here and now for ourselves as the reference point. In Hume’s words, we “imagine our ancestors to be, in a manner, mounted above us, and our posterity to lie below us.”5 Nothing is wrong in general with time seeming to be a succession of my ­todays leading gradually out of my past and into my f­ uture. It is difficult enough to get out of bed in the morning when one’s focus is simply on the day ahead. If one also always needed immediately to confront the ups and downs of the past as well as the likely ups and downs of

Th e P ivota l G e n e r ati o n 3

the ­future, it might seem, or indeed be, overwhelming. The neat conventional divisions into a long past and an indefinite ­future, separated by a manageably short pre­sent, is often helpful and for many purposes perfectly appropriate. To some degree, we understand, however, that the segregation of our consciousness into pre­sent, past, and ­future is both a fiction and an oddly self-­referential framework; your pre­sent was part of your ­mother’s ­future, and your ­children’s past ­will be in part your pre­sent. Again, nothing is generally wrong with structuring our consciousness of time in this conventional manner, and it often works well enough. In the case of climate change, however, the sharp division of time into past, pre­sent, and ­future has been desperately misleading and has, most importantly, hidden from view the extent of the responsibility of ­those of us alive now.6 The narrowing of our consciousness of time smooths the way to divorcing ourselves from responsibility for developments in the past and the ­future with which our lives are in fact deeply intertwined. In the climate case, it is not that we face the facts but then deny our responsibility. It is that the realities are obscured from view by the partitioning of time, and so questions of responsibility t­ oward the past and f­ uture do not arise naturally. Other times seem distant, and the p ­ eople who then lived or w ­ ill live in them appear to be irrelevant strangers. Acknowl­edgment of responsibility rests on recognition of connection. The climate connections are often not obvious. Chapters to come w ­ ill explore more fully some of the deep continuities inherent in climate change, but one obvious fact is the enormously long lead time built into some of the causal connections within climate. Carbon emissions injected into the atmosphere in a given year can contribute to forcing sea-­level rise in not merely ­later centuries, but ­later millennia, dozens of centuries ­after the source of ­those emissions has dis­appeared from the earth. Some carbon emissions released early in the Industrial Revolution are yet to have their full effect, which still lies in the ­future. Pre­sent and f­ uture emissions ­matter as much as they do only ­because of

4 C H A P TER 1

past emissions and their long-­lasting effects stretching far beyond the date of their release and on through the pre­sent. ­These long-­ lived connections provide a radically dif­fer­ent example of the insight about psy­chol­ogy and culture from one of the characters created by my fellow Southerner William Faulkner: “The past is never dead—it is not even past.”7 And similarly long chains reach from the pre­sent into the ­future. Conventionally, we tend to think that the f­ uture is yet to be born or is even only just beginning to be conceived. But the climate ­future was already beginning to take shape when ­humans started centuries ago to inject more carbon into the atmosphere than the usual climate dynamics could ­handle in the usual ways, and climate par­ameters ­were forced to start changing. The vast and accelerating carbon emissions of the late twentieth ­century and the early twenty-­first ­century are building minimum floors ­under the extent of climate change in f­ uture centuries, barring radically innovative corrections of kinds that may or may not be pos­si­ble and that we ­will discuss more fully in chapter 4. “The modes of common life that have arisen largely within the last one hundred years, and whose intensity has accelerated only since 1945, are shaping the planet for the next one thousand years, and perhaps the next 50,000.”8 The ­future is not inaccessible—we hold its fundamental par­ameters in our hands, and we are shaping them now. In this re­spect, the ­future is not unborn—it is not even ­future. “The evil that men do lives ­after them, the good is oft interred with their bones,” declared Shakespeare’s character Mark Antony.9 As an old man who, on the probabilities, ­ought to die fairly soon himself, I take considerable comfort in the knowledge that this dark assertion is an overbroad and skewed generalization (spoken as part of Mark Antony’s maneuvers at Caesar’s highly po­liti­cal funeral). The reach of the pre­sent—­what we who are alive can set into motion—­extends far across time for good as well as evil. In some cases—­climate change is one—­our reach w ­ ill be long and deep, millennial and profound, ­whether we wish it or not. And we can make its outcomes good—or, at worst, far better than they

Th e P ivota l G e n e r ati o n 5

would have been had we continued as we are headed now. One does better to heed what seems more likely to be Shakespeare’s own voice and “to love that well which thou must leave ere long.”10 The generation alive now is the pivotal generation in ­human history with regard to climate change, b ­ ecause of three features of our historical context. And our responsibilities are awesome especially b ­ ecause of the implications of the third feature. We can first glance at the context and then begin to explore the grounds of responsibility. The Context That Makes Us Pivotal

First, previous generations of ­humans have for around two centuries been changing our climate unintentionally and have left us with a global energy regime that now profoundly, progressively, and systematically forces the climate to change. The massive emissions of green­house gases (GHGs) that have resulted from the Industrial Revolution (and from the changes in the use of land, such as deforestation and the draining of wetlands, produced by the industrialization of agriculture) are disrupting the climate to which we and other living species had adapted over the previous ten thousand years of the Holocene. Second, we are the first h ­ umans to understand the essential dynamics of our planet’s climate; consequently, we have become aware of humanity’s unintended subversion of its own environment through its uninformed past choices of energy sources. Scientists whose work is relevant to climate have produced remarkable—­sometimes stunning—­results. Much uncertainty remains, of course, but the basic outlines of climate science are clear—­and far more advanced than they ­were only a few de­cades ago.11 This impressive new knowledge puts us for the first time in a position to affect the climate intentionally by escaping from our inherited energy regime and to act on transition plans that have a reasonable chance of accomplishing their goals. H ­ umans have been and still are in fact radically changing the planet’s climate

6 C H A P TER 1

without any plan, but we are newly in the position to try to get a grip on the effects of our own be­hav­ior and attempt to exercise some intentional control. Third, specifically what the science shows is that the default outcome is that the situation w ­ ill become progressively worse, and ­human economic business-­as-­usual ­will make the f­ uture more threatening than the past for most living species—­certainly including many h ­ umans, especially t­ hose with the fewest resources with which to adapt to the rapid, interacting changes.12 Our unintended changes are rapidly undermining our own security. Therefore, we are not only the first to be able to understand what to do, but—­ most importantly—we may also be the last to be in a position to act before we exacerbate some major threats. This gives us an awesome responsibility. ­Humans have accidentally set our own ­house on fire, and if we do not douse the flames while they are no more extensive than they are now, it may not be pos­si­ble ever to extinguish them. It is urgent for ­humans to get a grip on what we in aggregate are ­doing to the planet on which we live by blindly continuing the combustion of fossil fuels (and the destruction of natu­ral ecosystems by industrial agribusiness) and instead to employ our recently gained knowledge of the climate system to design a transition to an energy regime that does not undermine our civilization. Annual global carbon emissions in 2019 w ­ ere the highest ever,13 ­after a quarter c­ entury of mostly empty talk about tackling climate change, and the long-­term trajectory of carbon emissions is at pre­sent sharply upward. Accordingly, the cumulative atmospheric accumulation of CO2 reached its highest point in ­human history of 421.21 ppm in April 2021.14 If other green­house gases like methane are also counted, the atmospheric accumulation was already in December 2020 the equivalent of about 500 ppm of CO2.15 The pre-­Industrial-­Revolution level was around 270 ppm, so doubling is well within sight. The explanation of why inaction would see ­matters worsen, and action is therefore urgent, is empirical and draws on vari­ous aspects of science. It is briefly summarized in

Th e P ivota l G e n e r ati o n 7

the first chapter of a special report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Global Warming of 1.5 °C, usually referred to informally as the “Special Report on 1.5.”16 ­Here is the short version: b ­ ecause climate change is primarily driven by the cumulative atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2), and CO2 that reaches the atmosphere is extraordinarily per­sis­tent, climate change ­will not stop becoming more severe u ­ ntil injections of CO2 into the atmosphere completely stop—­that is, ­until ­human society reaches net zero carbon. For any given degree of climate change, ­there is a bud­get of cumulative atmospheric carbon: more carbon, more change. To limit average global temperature rise to 1.5°C, annual global net anthropogenic CO2 emissions must decline by about 45% from 2010 levels by 2030 and reach net zero around 2050; to limit the rise to below 2°C, CO2 emissions must decline by about 25% by 2030 and reach net zero around 2070.17 If one follows the science, one can see why carbon emissions must rapidly be brought to net zero globally if f­ uture generations are to live securely. E ­ very society’s energy system needs to be completely decarbonized by totally eliminating the use of fossil fuels in order to stop the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere within a relatively tolerable cumulative carbon bud­get. The minimum necessary for the safety of f­ uture generations, then, is a prompt global Energy Revolution. We are the pivotal generation, the only ones who can set the revolution strongly into motion while t­ here is still time. What I want to begin to explore a bit ­here, and elaborate in ­later chapters, is why we current h ­ umans o ­ ught to take the actions that are urgently necessary to stop climate change from becoming increasingly dangerous. The philosophically uninteresting reasons are self-­interested, and ­there are tons of ­those. For example, the kind of megawildfires recently experienced in California and Australia as a result of climate-­change-­induced drought and heat produced horrifying ­human deaths and misery and monumental economic costs, including the contentious bankruptcy of the largest California utility, PG&E, which in turn threatens impor­tant

8 C H A P TER 1

renewable energy firms that w ­ ere counting on long-­term contracts with PG&E, which in turn undermines the firms’ efforts to stay in business and provide energy without producing the damaging carbon emissions that contributed to the conditions for the wildfires—­one downward social cascade.18 We obviously need to protect ourselves from such economic vicious circles that undermine our own current interests. Arbitrary Demands?

The focus in this book w ­ ill instead be the converging moral reasons for action, which turn out to be multiple. I ­will concentrate on why we o ­ ught to act urgently and vigorously enough to protect ­future ­people from what ­will other­wise be the effects of perpetuating our pre­sent way of life permeated by an energy regime dominated by fossil fuels—­why we o ­ ught to change to a way of life fit for a ­future on the carbon-­sensitive planet we happen to live on.19 The science demonstrates that if robust and extensive action is not taken, conditions for living ­things ­will be progressively more challenging and threatening. The remaining practical question is, why should we now have to do more than the very substantial amount that is already in our own interest? Climate change w ­ ill worsen ­until it is ­limited, but a global Energy Revolution in the next ­couple of de­cades sounds like a heavy lift. Why should we in the ­here and now be expected to do so much? Does this not seem arbitrarily demanding? For a start, that par­tic­u­lar reaction seems at least as arbitrary as the situation might seem. One can focus on oneself and feel sorry for oneself: why poor me? But short-­term and narrow self-­ interestedness is not inevitable, however easy, and it is no less reasonable to have a broader focus, on the rest of the planet besides oneself and on time beyond the immediate f­ uture, and to embrace the situation as an exciting opportunity to lead a meaningful and valuable life that could benefit p ­ eople in the f­ uture—­perhaps even all ­future p ­ eople—or at least avoid depriving them of good

Th e P ivota l G e n e r ati o n 9

options. How should one feel? Which attitude should one adopt? Should one resent the “burden” or embrace the “challenge”? Does the task demand inordinate sacrifice, or is it a historic opportunity to do something exceptionally worthwhile? Our historical circumstances open up an intriguing prospect: what if some generations are called upon to meet challenges, or even to make sacrifices, that are unique to them? That do not fit any standard formula? Could this be? Climate scientists are telling us that we are now moving through an utterly crucial juncture. For a c­ entury and a half, carbon emissions ­were steadily climbing. Then, for the last three de­cades, they have been soaring: more than half of all the emissions since 1850 have occurred since 1986.20 Now we must quickly make emissions level off and then “bend the emissions curve downward”—­launch a steady decline in emissions at an ­angle across time that ­will bring the world to net zero carbon in two or three decades—­certainly within the ­middle years of the lives of ­those who are now u ­ nder forty years old. Other­wise, the only ways to hold total cumulative emissions to any total compatible with any remotely tolerable amount of temperature rise, and of all the other manifestations of climate change, would be e­ ither a l­ ater precipitous plunge in carbon emissions that is prob­ably po­liti­cally and eco­nom­ically impossible and would be utterly catastrophic socially if it actually occurred; or miraculous amounts of carbon capture and storage (CCS), carbon dioxide removal (CDR), or solar radiation management (SRM), technologies in which the fossil-­fuel companies have for de­cades steadfastly refused to invest, preferring to pour capital into exploration and production of more and more of the fuel that must never be burned without some such technologies. The choices, then, are in fact only four: dangerous levels of climate change from too much CO2 accumulated in the atmosphere; a steady and sharp decline in emissions starting immediately; an unmanageable collapse in emissions ­later; or infeasible levels of CCS, CDR, SRM, or other geo-­engineering technologies.21 I am obviously omitting the shading in the picture, but this is the general outline.

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Any way you slice it, it is absolutely crucial what the current generation does now. This is it. We face what in another context Martin Luther King Jr. called “the fierce urgency of Now.”22 But this may seem to ask too much of the current generation, each member of which is living the only life she ­will ever live and has some rights to enjoy. How, in the Churchillian phrase, could so much be asked of so few? I­ sn’t the burden of promptly and firmly initiating a global Energy Revolution too heavy for the current generation alone to be expected to bear? Unique Historical Period, Incomparable Moral Responsibility

This question about the perhaps exceptional extent of this generation’s responsibility is difficult to consider in a sensible manner, and I explore this topic further in the second half of chapter 3 and in chapter 4. As ­people ordinarily think of generations, at any given time three generations are alive: grandparents, parents, and ­children. From ­here on, I refer to ­these three together, however, simply as “the current generation”—­those alive now. The heart of one implicit complaint seems to be that it is somehow unfair to the current generation that the challenges we face are so much greater than what one might think is “the average burden for the average generation”—­it’s altogether too much to ask. That, however, is an oddly ahistorical way of thinking, a bit like asking why I c­ ouldn’t have been born into some other, pleasanter ­century. Perhaps the allusion to Churchill provides a hint. Was it fair that the so-­called greatest generation of the 1940s had to confront the Nazis by themselves? W ­ ouldn’t it have been fairer if the task could have been shared with, say, the ­people of the laid-­back 1960s (when I was “military age”)? But the p ­ eople of the 1960s could have helped to defeat the Nazis only if the Nazis ­were still undefeated in the 1960s, presumably by then much more entrenched. It is a good ­thing for all the rest of us who have

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followed that the generation of the 1940s ­rose fully to the occasion, and we remember them proudly. De­cades and centuries are not standardized, and we have no reason to expect the challenges they bring to be comparable. While reasonable sacrifices by individuals certainly have some limit, that limit seems to have nothing to do with any notion of standard generational burdens, a notion that could only be made to seem plausible by ignoring historical context. A complaint that burdens are unfair makes sense only if ­those burdens could be redistributed and thereby made fairer, but most large-­scale historical challenges cannot be postponed, rescheduled for a more con­ve­nient time, or subdivided among dif­f er­ent generations. Of course, some threats, if ignored, die away on their own. Other threats, if not met when their outcome is still up for grabs, build momentum or become entrenched and create radically new realities on the ground. Defeating them ­later may be harder than defeating them now, if it is even still pos­si­ble. Contingent facts ­matter, and one must choose one’s fights knowledgeably. For better or for worse, you live at the time when you live. You confront what you confront. “You are h ­ ere,” as the street maps say. You can embrace your historical location or curse it—­you are ­free in your response—­but this response ­will have the effects that such a response has in such circumstances, at this point in history. You choose your response, but history, made by the ­earlier responses of ­others to their own circumstances, provides your social circumstances, which interact with your response to produce your effects and the dif­f er­ent social circumstances to be faced by f­ uture generations. We youths of the 1960s could not help with the ­battles of the 1940s ­because one cannot reach backward through history. The Hubble Telescope can show us what happened millions of years ago, but it does not enable us to intervene retroactively and change the universe’s course. For purposes of action, time—­for us ­humans, history—­moves only forward. A complaint about generational

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unfairness in the case of historically embedded current challenges fundamentally makes no sense: no lighter schedule of imminent tasks is pos­si­ble. The only alternatives we have are the responses actually available now. Historical context ­matters. Moreover, while one cannot reach back to effect change, one can reach forward. In fact, one cannot avoid reaching forward! It is not that we could decide, if we wished, to stretch out and change ­future history, as if “history itself ” w ­ ere somehow already ­going to go in one direction of its own ­until ­people bent around and diverted it into a dif­fer­ent direction from the one originally set. Unavoidably, we are partly making the f­ uture, like it or not: the ­human ­future, the planet’s ­future, ­will head in the direction we set. Historical context ­matters, but so do ­human action and choice. More precisely, ­future ­people’s starting place ­will be where we leave off. The ­future is partly in the pre­sent. History is a continuing drama with narrative threads r­ unning through many generations, and we ­humans are power­ful players in the drama. If we leave a planet with a climate still dominated by a fossil-­fuel regime, the next generations ­will have to strug­gle to escape from this regime within the far worse climate that continuous combustion of fossil fuels ­will have produced by then, ­because we did not arrange a timely escape. ­Future ­people cannot reduce our challenges, but we—­and only we—­can reduce theirs. Or, we can indulge existing consumption habits and energy practices to make their challenges worse—­our choice, their inheritance. In the remainder of this introductory chapter, I want to separate out three closely connected reasons why it is especially impor­ tant that our generation makes an exceptionally robust effort on climate change: (1) f­ uture generations w ­ ill very likely face burdens and dangers greater than ours, (2) the worsening dangers are currently unlimited, and (3) less effort by us may well allow climate change to pass critical tipping points. In sum, the burdens and dangers for ­future generations ­will prob­ably be worse and are now worsening, are still without limit, and are potentially unbearable.

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That is why the strug­gle to stop the destabilization of the climate is our generation’s fight. Heavier Burdens

In the past, when phi­los­o­phers and economists have thought about princi­ples of intergenerational justice, they have usually assumed that t­ here must be some kind of standard formula—­for example, a single discount rate—­that can be applied reiteratively. John Rawls, for example, originally wrote that when we are considering what princi­ple should guide the current generation’s relation to the next, we should ask what princi­ple we could have expected the previous generation to have a­ dopted with regard to us—­a kind of slightly asymmetric intergenerational Golden Rule.23 The previous ­people should have done such-­and-­such for the current ­people, and the current ­people should do about the same, but perhaps a bit more or a bit less, for the next ­people.24 Rawls’s approach seems to me unhelpful for climate change ­because of three of its assumptions. The first is the one criticized in the previous section: that one can adequately characterize the situation faced by ­every generation in general terms in the abstract as if history had no integral fabric with periods of war and periods of peace, times of stability and times of disruption. Dif­f er­ent generations may confront radically dif­fer­ent circumstances demanding incommensurable types and levels of burdens and opportunities. His comment that “presumably this rate changes depending upon the state of society” does not seem to capture with sufficient vividness how extreme the differences between even adjacent generations can be in the wake of some exponential change.25 Ideal theory cannot guide us. Second, he formulates the obligations as exclusively between adjacent generations (with reiterations), without serious examination of pos­si­ble direct obligations now to whoever lives in the distant ­future, whose situation needs to be taken seriously by current planning in the context of a phenomenon like climate change

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that locks in effects over millennia. The time lags between cause and effect in the dynamics of the climate system are far longer than most causal connections we ordinarily encounter. The third is that what Rawls sees as called for on behalf of ­future ­people are mainly positive contributions: how much should we save for them? However, our current effects with regard to climate change on whichever ­people live in ­future is in fact quite dif­fer­ ent and potentially much more negative. All decisions about the degree of ambition for emissions mitigation in the pre­sent are unavoidably also decisions about how to distribute risks and burdens forward among this generation and multiple ­future generations, as we ­will see more clearly in the section on “Bequeathing Risks” in chapter 4. The less risk we bear, the more risk o ­ thers bear. The avoidance of damage—­and protection against damage—­ looms larger than the provision of savings, although the provision of alternative energy technology, which is a kind of embodied savings, is a crucial ele­ment in avoiding damage and disruption.26 Mitigation is more ambitious insofar as it contributes to reaching zero emissions of CO2 globally at an ­earlier date—­and therefore at a lower level of cumulative atmospheric accumulation of CO2 and resultant climate change. That the extent of our efforts profoundly affects ­future climate dangers is fairly obvious. Even if ­there ­were one fixed quantity of risks that had to be dealt with by some combination of p ­ eople now and p ­ eople l­ ater, the fewer the risks that ­were dealt with by ­people now, the more of ­those same tasks would remain to be dealt with by ­people ­later, along with the tasks that would in any case arise only l­ater. Of course, tasks for which now is the last chance may simply go forever unfulfilled. But since over time the climate risks specifically are in fact expanding in number, increasing in severity, and in some cases feeding upon each other, that fewer of the pre­sent tasks are tackled means not only that relatively more of them may remain to be tackled in the f­ uture, if it is not then already too late, but also that the number and seriousness of the dangers ­will be absolutely greater than if we had acted decisively, b ­ ecause our failure to deal

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with current threats ­will leave open doors to danger that we could have closed. Not only may some of the original risks remain still to be tackled, but additional risks that could e­ arlier have been headed off entirely ­will instead have emerged and need to be confronted too. Positive feedbacks cause some climate risks to reinforce ­others. For instance, when the white Arctic sea ice melts, the dark ocean ­water uncovered absorbs more heat than the white ice used to, and so the warming ­water melts the remaining sea ice faster still, revealing even more dark w ­ ater. This is the primary reason the Arctic has warmed far faster than the remainder of the planet (which scientists call “polar enhancement” of temperature rise). I ­will look at feedbacks ­later in this chapter. For now, let us simply note that u ­ nless climate change is s­ topped, it ­will grow worse ­because, for one ­thing, in crucial re­spects it feeds on itself. If we allow climate change to grow by unpredictable increments of severity over an unspecified further expanse of time, the burdens that fall upon some ­future generations may vastly exceed the burdens that we face now. And they w ­ ill become heavier then than they would have been if we had acted more energetically now. Thus, the threats to whoever lives in ­future generations w ­ ill be more severe by two distinguishable standards: more serious than ours are now and more serious than the burdens then would have become if we had acted other­wise. Is it fair to leave ­future ­people to face a much harder, and increasingly hard, challenge b ­ ecause we refused to face an easier one? ­These heavier climate burdens also come in two distinguishable va­ri­e­ties: the biophysical and the sociopo­liti­cal. On the one hand, as long as CO2 continues to be emitted by ­human economic activities, physical climate change ­w ill become progressively worse b ­ ecause it is the long-­lived cumulative concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere that is the primary driver of climate change. (1) The more cumulative CO2 in the atmosphere, the greater climate change. In addition, climate change feeds on itself through positive feedbacks. (2) The more climate change, the greater climate change still. Th ­ ese are physical sources of heavier burdens

16 C H A P TER 1

for f­ uture ­humans for as long as the carbon emissions that drive climate change are not brought u ­ nder control. On the other hand, the current sociopo­liti­cal situation in at least the nations with the wealth and power—­not in Yemen, not in Syria, not in Eastern Congo, but in most affluent countries—is relatively malleable, or at least not desperate, compared to the situation that is likely to arise in the ­future if climate change is permitted to worsen unabated. The current situation is unfavorable to climate action in impor­tant re­spects; for example, fossil-­fuel interests now control the legislative branch of the US federal government and the Rus­sian, Saudi, Australian, and Brazilian governments. The United States in par­tic­u­lar confronts mi­grants fleeing oppression and poverty in Central Amer­i­ca that is exacerbated by droughts and hurricanes worsened by climate change. US social discourse is increasingly uncivil and bitterly partisan, repeated local massacres are carried out with un­regu­la­ted guns including military weapons, and Black citizens are regularly murdered by White police. Nevertheless, major nonviolent social change, including radical change in the energy system, still appears to be pos­si­ble and recently to have become likely, although extremist vio­lence is also growing. Neither the sociopo­liti­cal situation, which I discuss more fully in chapter 5 in the context of what action to take next, nor the physical climatic situation is yet completely out of control or impossible to change through essentially normal po­liti­cal action. At some unpredictable time, if climate change continues to worsen, some phenomenon such as genuinely massive mi­grant flows—­external or internal, from flooded coastal cities—­may come to seem so threatening that the prospects for civil, cooperative, constructive responses are likely to decline much further and perhaps give way to social conflict. Th ­ ese are highly complex social phenomena, and I do not want to speculate. The fact is simply that, however unfavorable to cooperative action on climate change one thinks the po­liti­cal situation is now, politics could become much more dysfunctional, with social disruptions that would further

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smooth the path for demagogues with pseudosolutions and nationalists blind to global solutions, and such domestic deterioration could create higher obstacles to constructive international cooperation on prob­lems that cannot be dealt with by individual socie­ties. If we cannot accomplish positive multilateral action on climate change in our pre­sent situation, however absolutely good or bad one thinks it is, ­there is good reason to believe that positive action could become relatively much harder precisely when the physical/climatic threats themselves worsen. ­Future ­people, in sum, could face worse climate threats in less favorable sociopo­liti­ cal circumstances with more violent and misinformed opposition. The challenges for ­future ­people ­will be greater than ours almost no m ­ atter what. The challenges w ­ ill be greater still than they would have been if we do not do what urgently needs to be done now. Unlimited Threats

More telling still is the crucial fact that, so far, we have failed to place any outer limit on the severity of climate change, ­either its physical manifestations or its sociopo­liti­cal effects. For now, physical climate change can simply worsen in­def­initely. If certain tasks must be done sooner or l­ater, and if we complete fewer of them, other ­people in ­future ­will need to do more. But climate change is not so benign. It is not merely that we may leave work against the dangers unfinished—­the dangers are multiplying, thanks to our continuing profligate combustion of fossil fuel. If we do less now, the worst in ­future ­will not only be worse than it other­wise would have been, but, as of now, worse without constraint. Specifically, ­until CO2 emissions reach net zero, ­there ­will be no limit on how severe climate change must become. It is intolerable that we should acquiesce in contributing to a potential runaway global danger. If any ­human duty is unconditional, it is the duty to preserve the fundamental conditions, including the physical preconditions, of ­human society by avoiding dangerous threats to ­those

18 C H A P TER 1

conditions. Yet in blindly toying with the climate, we are daring to experiment with modifying t­ hese very preconditions of h ­ uman physical and social life, in a manner famously noted well over half a ­century ago by Roger Revelle and Hans E. Suess: “­Human beings are now carry­ing out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the ­future. Within a few centuries we are returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years.”27 Equally famously, and more sardonically, another g­ reat climate scientist, Wallace Broecker, quipped, “The climate system is an angry beast and we are poking it with sticks.”28 No responsible scientist believes that climate change is yet fixed on a trajectory ­toward ­human extinction. But numerous scientists have embraced the idea that we should think of the period of history that we have recently entered as the “Anthropocene” ­because this has become an age in which the most power­ful force changing our planet is aggregate h ­ uman activity, including centrally the anthropogenic emissions that are increasingly modifying the planet’s climate.29 Without intending to, we are gradually wresting control of the climate, among other ­things, from the natu­ral forces that used to determine it. Like someone who knocks the rider out of the ­saddle of a galloping h ­ orse and climbs on without knowing how to r­ ide, we are taking control away without gaining control ourselves or, chillingly, having any good plan about how to keep it. The planet’s climate is being thrown into confusion by the originally unpredicted and unintended effects of growing h ­ uman consumption powered by expanding carbon energy. The most elementary advice given to ­people who planned to visit a casino in the days before ubiquitous credit cards and phone banking was to decide while they ­were still at home how much was the maximum amount they could afford to lose and take only that much cash with them. In other words, put a firm limit on maximum losses in the face of uncertainty. ­Those who opt for less ambitious mitigation than is readily pos­si­ble are ignoring this

Th e P ivota l G e n e r ati o n 19

basic advice with regard to the well-­being of ­future generations. They are leaving potential absolute losses for ­people in the ­future unbounded. It is well established that as long as the atmospheric concentration of green­house gases—­and especially CO2—­continues to expand, climate change ­will continue to become more severe.30 And as long as CO2 is emitted in amounts that produce net additions to the atmospheric concentration, that concentration ­will of course continue to expand. Accordingly, u ­ ntil global carbon emissions reach net zero, no outer limit on the maximum severity of climate change has been set. The severity of climate change can worsen in­def­initely u ­ ntil carbon emissions reach zero. Decarbonization must be thorough and prompt to cap the atmospheric concentration, which requires vastly more ambitious mitigation than nations are currently committed to. The less ambitious mitigation is, the ­later the date that the atmospheric accumulation ­will stabilize. As long as climate change remains unbounded, the costs of the ­gamble inflicted upon ­future generations has no upper limit. This imposed g­ amble is explored more fully in “Bequeathing Risks” in chapter 4. I should be more explicit about what I mean ­here by “unlimited,” by which I am not claiming that the climate ­will change an infinite amount. And by “­limited” climate change I do not mean a climate that completely stops changing and never changes again. As some opponents of action to slow the current climate change like to point out, the climate has always changed and w ­ ill always change. The climate of the earth w ­ ill always be influenced by changes in the earth’s orientation ­toward the sun, and many other nonhuman f­ actors.31 I restrict “­limited” and “unlimited” to anthropogenic change. Unlimited anthropogenic climate change is the maximum climate change that h ­ umans can cause. ­Limited climate change is less change than h ­ umans could have caused. So when I say that climate change is currently unlimited, I mean that nothing currently stands in the way of anthropogenic climate change becoming maximum anthropogenic climate change. We

20 C H A P TER 1

are currently on course to do however much damage to the climate of our own planet h ­ umans are capable of d ­ oing. But “anthropogenic” is a long word, so I ­will not keep repeating this qualifier. The sociopo­liti­cal downside also remains unlimited. This is chilling. Unbounded danger is difficult to judge judiciously. ­Human beings at their best are inexpressibly remarkable, with their indomitable spirits and their unrelenting resilience. I do not recommend generally betting against the h ­ uman race. And yet, ­human civilization can be surprisingly fragile. Remember the armed looters in the British Virgin Islands and St. Martin a­ fter Hurricane Irma in 2017, stealing food and ­water from their neighbors, as often happens a­ fter disasters. Remember how quickly the Hungarian government of authoritarian Victor Orbán fenced out all Syrian refugees. Remember the rabid insurrectionists at the US Capitol in 2021, beating fallen police with flag poles. Somewhere in the shadows of stress, the social norms begin to tear. That physical stresses lead to conflicting po­liti­cal demands, which themselves can rend the social fabric, is hardly a new insight. One may have supposed that Thomas Hobbes was displaying a capacity for dystopian imagination when he wrote, “­There is no place for industry, ­because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; . . . ​no arts; no letters; no society. And, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”32 But according to Geoffrey Parker’s monumental global history, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth C ­ entury, Hobbes actually needed only to look around at the state of the world in what we now have understood as the heart of “the L ­ ittle Ice Age”—­ roughly, the 1640s to the 1690s.33 The ­Little Ice Age consisted of climate change of only a single degree of average global temperature—­downward, not upward, of course—­but this modest bit of climate change, and especially the resultant disturbances to agricultural production and food prices,

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­ ere one side of what Parker aptly calls a “fatal synergy” that was w an exacerbating ­factor in a global mélange of trou­bles, ranging from the Thirty Years War in Eu­rope to the violent Ming/Qing transition in China. Well before large numbers of individual ­people ­will collapse from heat stress from climate heating in the twenty-­ first ­century, their socie­ties ­will be liable, at some unpredictable point, to become incapable of farsightedness, fairness, or even cooperation, and to disintegrate into conflicts over places to live and places to grow food, and over priorities for the distribution of ­these places.34 Yale historian Timothy Snyder has marked one more recent pathway steeply downward: When an apocalypse is on the horizon, waiting for scientific solutions seems senseless, strug­gle seems natu­ral, and demagogues of blood and soil come to the fore. A sound policy for our world, then, would be one that keeps the fear of planetary catastrophe as far away as pos­si­ble. This means accepting the autonomy of science from politics, and making the po­liti­cal choice to support the pertinent kinds of science that w ­ ill allow conventional politics to proceed. . . . ​As Hitler demonstrated during the ­Great Depression, ­humans are able to portray a looming crisis in such a way as to justify drastic mea­sures in the pre­sent.35 In the sociopo­liti­cal arena too, it is wise to call a halt well short of any cliff edges. Let me be explicit about what I am not suggesting. In recent de­cades, it has become almost a reflex among moral phi­los­o­phers to assert that climate action is urgent ­because other­wise the apocalypse is around the corner. I do not think that the apocalypse is around the corner—­nor is ­human extinction, nor even—­just yet—is the Hobbesian unraveling of civilization that I am invoking.36 For now, I am appealing only to the solid fact that all such threatening possibilities (and many ­others less serious than ­these, but still serious) persist u ­ ntil we stop feeding climate change. Each

22 C H A P TER 1

kind of disaster is pos­si­ble and can be reached easily from the route that we are now on, ­until limits make it impossible. A climate that is worsening in­def­initely leaves all bad options open. We have inadvertently opened the barn door, and some of the ­horses have bolted. But other valuable ­horses, for reasons of their own, have lingered in the barn. For now, nothing is stopping them from leaving too. It is past time, then, to relock the barn door securely and save all that can still be saved.37 It would be reprehensible to take no action even if in­def­initely worsening climate change w ­ ere a purely natu­ral phenomenon. (If it ­were purely natu­ral, it would be more difficult to figure out how to go about slowing it down.) Yet, for us simply to sit idly by and watch anthropogenic climate change become progressively worse and prepare to engulf ­future ­people would be even more shameful and pathetically weak. And since we are in fact driving climate change with our own GHGs, especially our carbon emissions, we do at least understand what needs to be done for us to stop making conditions worse by our own be­hav­ior. And it is obviously all the more our responsibility—­a negative one simply not to wreak havoc—­for its being driven by our own actions. Scientists have clearly explained vari­ous mechanisms by which climate change could escalate in severity, and empirical findings show that we are provoking, or coming near to provoking, par­ tic­u­lar ones of ­these mechanisms. I have previously tried to establish that if one understands the mechanisms, and one is finding evidence that one of them is being activated, that is all one needs to know for action to be required.38 Lauren Hartzell-­Nichols has developed this kind of argument extensively in her book A Climate of Risk.39 One strength of this argument is that it has relatively weak premises: only the theoretical claim that mechanisms are understood, and the empirical claim that evidence is accumulating that the mechanisms are being engaged. When one adds to the satisfaction of ­those two premises the fact that no limit has been established on how dangerous climate change may become,40 it is utterly irresponsible for t­ hose of us

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alive now not to do our utmost to limit, at the very least, our own contributions to the f­ uture danger and instead to continue the pre­sent practices—­most notably, casually burning vast quantities of fossil fuel—­that are adding continuously to the mushrooming danger. On the one hand, how much, if anything, the ­people alive at a given time ­ought to do positively with regard to whichever ­people are yet to come, numbers and identities of whom are of course unknown ­because neither numbers nor identities have yet been determined by events including our choices, is a contested ­matter. O ­ ught we to try only to see that they are no worse off than we are?41 Should we try to make their lives better than ours, with or without discounting? And so forth. On the other hand, the additional consideration ­here is comparatively and absolutely less controversial: we ­ought not to continue to increase dangers to ­future ­people—­potentially, all ­future ­people—­without limit when we understand the mechanisms by which the dangers can increase and have evidence that the mechanisms are in motion. I cannot imagine a plausible moral view that would not embrace this imperative. To deny this negative imperative would accord zero value, worth, and re­spect to numberless ­future p ­ eople. To reject it would constitute calmly contemplating the pos­si­ble undermining of the necessary conditions for civilized socie­ties and even the pos­si­ble creation of the sufficient conditions for ­human extinction, since climate change can produce levels of heat and other phenomena that ­humans cannot endure. Tipping Points

We have in addition another compelling reason for robust immediate action in recently acquired understanding of the dynamics of the planetary climate. While we are discussing climate change that is anthropogenic, it is crucial to keep in mind that whenever h ­ uman action sets off positive feedbacks, what was originally anthropogenic to some degree takes on a life of its own.42 Andreas Malm characterizes it nicely: “Society having touched

24 C H A P TER 1

off climate change, nature does the rest of the work. . . . ​Global warming is not built but triggered.”43 We are confronting climate change that is initiated by h ­ umans, but this increasingly includes the positive feedbacks produced by the already operative climate dynamics into which we are recklessly intruding. Extensive theoretical understanding and solid evidence suggest that we are in fact approaching a number of critical “tipping points,” such as threshold ocean surface temperatures that ­will precipitate the collapse of massive Antarctic ice sheets and Greenland ice sheets, driving sea levels much higher and gradually inundating sea coasts around the world and driving populations out of cities with locations like Mumbai, Shanghai, Miami, and New York—­and, of course, much of The Netherlands and Bangladesh.44 While the current climate change is anthropogenic—­driven by society’s failure to mobilize against the primitive and dirty energy sources of coal, oil, and gas—­the direct changes provoke natu­ral responses that feed into further change. In short, while h ­ umans began the pro­cess, it could run away. Notoriously but horribly, natu­ral species have been rapidly crashing for years.45 If enough positive feedbacks fed into each other to launch what the scientists call a cascade of positive feedbacks, it could lead to a “Hot­house Earth.”46 ­These scientists are now suggesting that a cascade is liable to begin soon if we persist in our failure to take prompt and serious mea­sures to reduce carbon emissions. In my argument h ­ ere, however, I pull back to the s­ imple fact that for now cascades remain pos­si­ble b ­ ecause climate change remains unlimited. I do not rely on an assumption that a cascade of positive feedbacks is definitely about to begin or even that it is likely to begin, although this may very well be true. I assume only that an anthropogenically launched cascade is entirely pos­si­ble ­because vari­ous individual tipping points are likely to be passed as long as climate change continues without restraint. It is, then, likely that the near f­ uture is the last chance to avoid passing significant tipping points and entirely pos­si­ble that the near ­future is the last chance to avoid provoking a cascade of tipping

Th e P ivota l G e n e r ati o n 25

points.47 ­These tipping points are significant ­because they unleash ­either or both of two conceptually separable but often empirically inseparable pro­cesses. Passing a tipping point means triggering irreversible change, and frequently ­these irreversible changes themselves also become long-­term positive feedbacks, sometimes exacerbating other pro­cesses of climate change so that they become exponential, a “cascade.” Conceptually, a change’s being irreversible and a change’s being a positive feedback are two dif­ fer­ent ­matters. (And changes’ being at any given time unlimited in number is a third m ­ atter.) Obviously, even an irreversible change that was not a positive feedback would still by itself contribute to making climate change worse u ­ ntil it ran its course. If the melting of an ice sheet becomes irreversible, the melting ­will contribute to sea-­level rise (­because the w ­ ater in ice sheets now rests on land) u ­ ntil the ice has all melted. When the ice is all gone, that par­tic­ul­ ar pro­cess w ­ ill stop. This melting may be irreversible, but the pro­cess need not continue in­def­initely. So a par­tic­u­lar pro­cess could be irreversible, but also be ­limited, and not be the source of positive feedback.48 Nevertheless, if one pro­cess a­ fter another w ­ ill contribute to making climate change worse, the overall climate change would worsen without limit, even if each contributing pro­cess would run a ­limited course, ­until all contributing pro­cesses had run their vari­ous courses. If the West Antarctic Ice Sheet melts, that w ­ ill make sea-­level rise worse ­until that ice is gone. If the Greenland Ice Sheet melts, it in turn w ­ ill make sea-­level rise worse u ­ ntil that ice is gone. So too the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.49 Each case of melting is obviously constrained by the amount of ice available to melt, but the quantities are staggering. Recent calculations show “that Earth lost 28 trillion tonnes of ice between 1994 and 2017. . . . ​ The rate of ice loss has risen by 57% since the 1990s.”50 Climate change—­here, sea-­level rise—­can continue u ­ ntil all the ice in all the ice sheets is gone. At some point, many millennia from now, the residual effects of h ­ umans might fade out, especially if h ­ umans are gone. Or perhaps the course of geological history would have

26 C H A P TER 1

been forever diverted from the path it would other­wise have followed if h ­ umans had not existed and created an Industrial Revolution based on moving carbon from u ­ nder the earth into the air. ­Either way, the damage caused would be immea­sur­able. Conclusion

I have separated out three conceptually distinct strands of the basis for urgent and robust action to stop climate change from worsening: inevitably more difficult challenges for ­future ­people, no limit yet on the extent to which ­humans ­will modify the climate, and the danger of passing critical points of no return: tipping points that launch irreversible change. What is truly scary is empirical combinations of two or more of ­these ­factors, especially if one of the ­factors is the third: passing tipping points for abrupt worsening. For instance, it is already worrying that we have so far imposed no limit on the disruption that we are causing to the climate, but that could mean only that we w ­ ere very slowly and incrementally making ­matters worse for a while. But if we leave the disruption unlimited for long enough that we meanwhile pass critical tipping points like initiating irreversible melting of additional major ice sheets, then the most l­ imited that the damage can possibly ever be ­will be far worse than other­wise. The other side of the coin, of course, is that if we throw ourselves into the effort, we can make a huge positive difference for the lives of virtually ­every f­ uture person who lives on this planet. The pro­cesses sketched just above are concrete embodiments of the real­ity that time is continuous, not partitioned, except for practical con­ve­nience in our own consciousness. Any attempted separation of the flow of h ­ uman history, its c­ auses, its effects, and the responsibilities of ­those of us who ­will unavoidably contribute to the f­ uture direction of the flow into discrete periods is at best an oversimplification and often an illusion or an evasion. I live amid the wealth, ease, and technological won­ders of a postindustrial society only b ­ ecause of the fossil-­fuel combustion that drove the

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Industrial Revolution in my past and created my pre­sent standard of living. My pre­sent immersion in a growth-­obsessed, plastic-­ strangled consumerist society that still burns ever more fossil fuels each year (except the pandemic year of 2020) is locking in critical and dangerous features of the ­future climate of ­people I erringly tend to think of as distant strangers. For me to deny that this past and this ­future are part of who I am and what I do would be to fail to acknowledge fundamental realities and to shirk inescapable responsibilities. Or so I ­will try further to show in what follows.

2 The Presence of the Past

You know, they straightened out the Mississippi in places, to make room for h ­ ouses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods ­these places. “Floods” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be.1 It might then be discovered that the agent has done something she had never dreamed of. She owns the action no less for that. . . . ​The outcomes . . . ​are integral aspects of the original action as stretched out over time. Global warming is an integral aspect of consuming fossil fuels, not another action performed by ­others. . . . ​The fact that ­humans act within the carbon cycle and other cir­cuits of nature does not in any way diminish our agency. It amplifies it.2 For it is only by assuming full responsibility ­here for one’s own elsewhere, only by assuming full responsibility ­today for one’s own yesterday, only by this unqualified assumption of responsibility by the “I” for itself and for every­thing it ever was and did, does the “I” achieve continuity and thus identity with the self.3 28

Th e P r e s e n c e o f th e Pa s t 29

Why is it so impor­tant that ­humans urgently cease injecting CO2 into the atmosphere in the ­future? Pre­sent and ­future emissions ­matter primarily ­because we ­humans have already injected so much CO2 into the atmosphere in the past. As mentioned in chapter 1, the earth’s climate system has a single carbon bud­get for any given probability for any given amount of change in the foreseeable ­future. This means that the carbon bud­get is both global and cumulative, and that means: no separate bud­gets for past, pre­ sent, and ­future. Th ­ ere is one carbon bud­get for all the centuries of any relevance to h ­ umans. The proportion of the bud­get that was used up in the past is therefore not available in the pre­sent or the ­future. That much of the bud­get has been spent; that much CO2 has already been loosed upon the planet; and much of that CO2 ­will remain in the atmosphere for significant stretches of the ­future, forcing the climate to change, ­unless the CO2 could be actively removed and once again securely sequestered u ­ nder the land or the sea from where fossil-­fuel companies still persist in extracting it.4 Of course, the emitted CO2 is not unchanging. CO2 gradually decomposes by each of several dif­f er­ent natu­ral pro­cesses, which are complex and which scientists have only recently begun to grasp. Dif­fer­ent pro­cesses operate over dif­fer­ent time-­spans, so dif­fer­ent bits of CO2 remain in the atmosphere, the oceans, the vegetation, and the soil for dif­fer­ent lengths of time. The vari­ous gradual rates of natu­ral decomposition and removal can be built into climate models, and scientists can probabilistically compute them more precisely.5 But from the perspective of ­human life and history, the removal pro­cesses are all slow, and the slowest are very slow indeed. Natu­ral pro­cesses have no chance whatsoever of removing CO2 from the atmosphere at any rate remotely approximating the ferocious rate at which ­human activities are spewing it into the atmosphere. For all practical purposes—­for all ­human decisions about policies affecting the climate—­once the CO2 is injected by combustion into the atmosphere, large portions stay ­there. In this case, what goes up mostly stays up. The earth has a

30 C H A P TER 2

single cumulative carbon bud­get for the ­human past, the pre­sent, and as much of the ­human f­ uture as we could conceivably foresee and care about—­for multiple millennia. This book is primarily forward-­looking. Far more attention is given to the presence of the ­future than to the presence of the past. But we need first to take a brief look at the past and the ways in which it permeates the pre­sent in order to appreciate the stringency of the current requirements about what to do about climate change now; that is the task of this chapter. Con­temporary climate change did not invade the earth from somewhere ­else in the universe. Climate change is a product of this planet, made h ­ ere by par­tic­u­lar choices by par­tic­u­lar ­people in specific nations at specific times—­most critically, of course, the choices that led to the Industrial Revolution fired by fossil fuel and to the unleashing of our current climate change by the carbon emissions from ­those fuels. A concrete ­human past created the concrete ­human pre­sent that is threatened by accelerating climate change. At the conclusion of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2018 (COP 24), the US federal government issued the following stark declaration: “The United States is not taking on any burdens or financial pledges in support of the Paris Agreement and w ­ ill not allow climate agreements to be used as a vehicle to redistribute wealth.”6 This official statement by the US Department of State implicitly assumes the nation-­state as the unit of analy­sis. Within the ­human species, I take individual persons to be the units of ultimate value; I take their rights to be supremely impor­tant; and I take nation-­ states, or governments, sometimes to have instrumental value but never to have ultimate value. At their best, states are servants of their own p ­ eople without being threats to the p ­ eople of other states; states rarely perform so well. In this chapter, nevertheless, I want to confront this official position of the US federal government in its own nation-­state terms, which are ­after all the terms of the Paris Agreement of 2015 and virtually all international climate negotiations, for better and for worse. For the sake of all the

Th e P r e s e n c e o f th e Pa s t 31

arguments in this chapter, I w ­ ill accept the nation-­state as the unit of analy­sis.7 The last and most extensive of the three arguments in this chapter, built around the introduction of the concept of sovereign externalization, is a critique of (national) state sovereignty as it is normally practiced and as it is implicated in climate change. Owning Our National Past

Throughout the international negotiations since the adoption in 1992 of the Framework Convention on Climate Change, the US federal government has insisted that past national emissions are not the basis for a pre­sent national responsibility for dealing with the climate change that ­those past emissions are now causing. Many other national governments acknowledge some degree of what is usually called “historical responsibility”: pre­sent national responsibility that is basically proportional to past national contributions to the prob­lem, mea­sured ordinarily by cumulative past national emissions (or per capita cumulative emissions), which can reasonably be thought of as the proportion of the ­whole world’s cumulative carbon bud­get consumed already by any one nation. In this chapter, I examine this issue of historical responsibility and explain why the above position adamantly asserted by the US federal government is indefensible and in denial of real­ity. Many state-­and local-­level US po­liti­cal leaders, and many national leaders throughout the world, have rejected the efforts of the US federal government to divorce itself from history in this way. I ­will try to show briefly why t­ hese critics of the federal government are correct. This chapter pre­sents three in­de­pen­dent arguments for what I take to be the most intuitive understanding of historical responsibility: a pure fairness argument and two wrongful imposition arguments, one in which what are imposed are seen as violations of rights and one in which what are imposed are seen as ordinary economic costs. The per­sis­tent calls in international negotiations for historical responsibility for climate change are always calls for

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the ac­cep­tance of accountability for the full consequences of a historical pro­cess of industrialization that relied on burning fossil fuels and that occurred nation by nation, but imposed the consequences of that reliance on carbon combustion on humanity generally. However, not every­one means the same t­ hing by “historical responsibility,” and the three specific arguments presented h ­ ere are not the usual ones found in the lit­er­a­ture.8 The nations with historical responsibility are ­those who contributed to climate change by deriving the energy for their industrialization from the combustion of carbon-­based fuels.9 No nation has yet shouldered anywhere near the full consequences thereby created for ­human health and environmental stability across the world generally. T ­ hose prob­lems include lethal air pollution, especially the particulate ­matter from burning coal that was pre­ sent from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the grimy pioneering Welsh and En­glish factory towns; ocean, river, and groundwater pollution from perennial oil spills; perpetual methane leaks from extraction and transport of gas; and, worst of all, CO2 emissions that began to exhaust the climate system’s l­ imited capacity to pro­cess additional anthropogenic CO2 without raising surface temperatures throughout the planet. Green­house gases are multiple, but by far the most impor­tant green­house gas cumulatively to date is CO2 from combustion of fossil fuel: fossil fuels “are, by far, the largest contributor to global climate change, accounting for over 75% of global GHG emissions and close to 90% of all carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.”10 The primary source of the anthropogenic CO2 accumulated in the atmosphere has been the national pro­cesses of industrialization, which have occurred in dif­fer­ent nations at dif­fer­ent times, even dif­fer­ent centuries. G ­ reat Britain industrialized in the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries, while India industrialized in the twentieth and twenty-­first. The damage from industrialization has been universally distributed in the form of, among other ­things, the growing dangers constituting climate change that face every­one,

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including every­one in ­future generations of all nations, and the massive prob­lems of air pollution that kill millions ­every year.11 The contention of the national climate negotiators who acknowledge historical responsibility for climate change, then, is that the nations that w ­ ere the first movers and unilaterally controlled their own pro­cesses of industrialization should restore the global playing field to a more level position by bearing their share of the burdens that are resulting from their disruption of the global climate with the still-­accumulating green­house gases they have been injecting into the atmosphere. This contention is grounded in the unilateral national causal contributions to global harms and other global costs from the pro­cesses of national industrialization, including the industrialization of agriculture by agribusinesses. In the aforementioned US State Department’s declaration at the end of COP 24 in 2018, the US federal government pre­ sents itself as defending Americans against greedy claims for re­distribution by foreigners who would take away what is rightfully ours. By contrast, climate negotiators advancing claims of historical responsibility are demanding that the United States and other highly industrialized nations take back upon themselves the dispersed costs of their own industrialization that have so far been dumped upon humanity generally. The US federal government insists, on the contrary, that the benefits of US industrialization are rightfully all the United States’ own: all benefits are rightfully retained, while all costs (wrongful harms and ordinary costs) are rightfully scattered—­and properly left to lie wherever they fall. In fact, industrialization has involved a massive and time-­lagged—­ and therefore largely hidden—­distribution of costs imposed across the planet and into, among ­others, countries that had not yet industrialized. This past dispersal of delayed costs is not past; the ongoing costs simply remained invisible u ­ ntil the climate scientists made the effects of the past carbon emissions on the ­future climate more apparent to eyes ordinarily focused on the pre­sent, and in many cases distracted by de­cades of lies about climate

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change and diversionary tactics on the part of the defenders of the energy-­business-­as-­usual.12 The contribution to damage done begins with the role played in the creation of the global carbon energy regime that relies on extracting, transporting, refining, and burning of fossil fuels, whose emissions continue to force the climate to become increasingly inhospitable to h ­ uman flourishing. The international carbon regime greatly benefited some socie­ties for a time by fueling national industrial growth but is now harming practically all by undermining the stability of the climate and increasingly the stability of the very economy created. Disowning Our National Past

To this contention that the nations that are the initiators and the proprietors of industrialization should mainly bear its costs, the primary objection has been that the contention is harsh—­unfairly harsh—­for two main reasons. Individuals in the pre­s ent and ­future in the industrialized nations would, it is claimed, suffer for “crimes” they did not themselves commit and for “crimes” that ­were not crimes when the actions in question ­were done. Invoking historical responsibility is thought to be like passing an ex post facto law and then, since the perpetrators of the newly minted “crime” are dead, punishing their ­children and grandchildren for this “crime” that was anyway not a crime at the time—­a double injustice. We would have targeted the wrong p ­ eople even if ­there ­were an offense, and anyway the relevant action was not an offense when it was done: wrong person and no offense. First objection: “wrong person.” Even if ­there ­were an offense, the offenders would now be dead. It is not fair, the objector urges, for pre­sent and f­ uture individuals to suffer for the sins of past individuals. Why should the pre­sent and ­future generations of the causally responsible nations pay the debts of previous generations of their respective nations?

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The nation, like many communities and collectives, is a historically continuous entity of which current individuals are members. The United States began in the eigh­teenth c­ entury and is still ­going. I could not have requested or consented to the carbon emissions of my US ancestors, of course, but I grew up and lived in the national economy they built through the pro­cesses of industrialization that caused t­ hose emissions. A nation contains continuing structures and institutions; past, pre­sent, and f­ uture members inherit ­these ongoing national formations and practices, including capital and infrastructure. We living stand to our pre­de­ces­sors in our own communities partly like someone who is the executor of a dead person’s estate: we must pay any remaining debts. The living compatriots are the executors simply ­because ­there is no one ­else who can reasonably be expected to do it, on the standard view of nations assumed by the US State Department.13 History does not consist of hermetically sealed separate acts with completely unrelated plots and entirely new casts. ­Human affairs are, for better and for worse, a continuing drama with narrative threads that run through many generations, as in Faulkner’s dictum: “The past is never dead—it is not even past.” The objector is attempting to construct dams in the continuous flow of national history. But are t­ here any liabilities for the pre­sent generation to inherit from past generations? By what standard did previous generations do anything for which accountability needs to be determined? Second objection: “no offense.” In most discussions of historical responsibility for climate change, the contribution to the creation of the prob­lem is conventionally mea­sured by cumulative emissions of CO2 by individual nations, but the exact formulation of this mea­sure requires more detailed discussion.14 Any suggestion that past emitters, and now their descendants, are accountable for ­those emissions would, an objector might say, create a crime ex post facto, or perhaps impose carbon pricing ex post facto. It was not illegal or other­wise wrong simply to release the carbon

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emissions at the time of the Industrial Revolution and since, and certainly no requirement to purchase an emissions permit or to pay a carbon tax existed when the ­earlier emissions ­were released. So why should anyone be punished or charged simply b ­ ecause emissions ­were innocently released? The answer to this objection is somewhat complicated and occupies the remainder of the chapter. I pre­s ent two dif­fer­ ent kinds of argument that, I believe, are both valid, and both point in the same general direction for policy. The second kind is more critical of customary practices than the first, and it in turn branches in two directions. I believe that the two arguments of the second type also cut more deeply, and we ­will see in chapter 3 that they have stronger implications for policy. I w ­ ill refer to them respectively as “the pure fairness argument” and “the wrongful imposition arguments.” The pure fairness argument focuses on the clear and straightforward fact that vari­ous generations of the early industrializing nations have contributed to the prob­lem of climate change by creating and developing the carbon energy regime that ­today continues to drive the worsening of the climate. The two wrongful imposition arguments consider the major significance of the source and extent of the relative benefit to t­ hose who brought about climate change, while the pure fairness argument leaves relative benefit aside. The Pure Fairness Argument

We should readily grant that no individuals in ­earlier generations ­ought to have been punished, for t­ here was indeed no crime, and we must also insist that all talk about crime and punishment rests on a bad and irrelevant analogy. An objection that assumes that someone is being said to be at fault would be denying a thesis that I am not advancing. What we now understand is that the Industrial Revolution was powered by an energy revolution that produced ­today’s global energy regime based on the exploration for and the extraction, transport, and combustion of fossil fuels.

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The combustion of fossil fuels is the main driver of climate change, although deforestation and other changes in land use and agricultural practices are also impor­tant. What is undeniable is that the combustion of fossil fuels is the main contributor to climate change. So it is accurate to say that the burning of gas, oil, and coal is causally responsible for most of the climate change.15 What the objection “no crime and therefore no punishment” gets right is that causal responsibility does not entail moral responsibility.16 Moral responsibility is a complex m ­ atter, but insofar as it involves being morally blamable (and therefore perhaps deserving of punishment or criticism), what one caused must have been morally wrong. One must be at fault for causing what one caused. I may be causally responsible for a new tree appearing in the backyard if I planted the tree. But if ­there is nothing wrong with having another tree in the backyard, it would be misleading to say that I am morally responsible for the appearance of the tree (­unless it is to thank me rather grandly for my gardening effort). A proponent of the “no crime” objection in the case of the fossil-­fuel regime would be using the misleading analogy of crime and punishment to acknowledge the obvious proposition that our ancestors are indeed causally responsible for the existence of the fossil-­fuel regime and its vast carbon emissions. But, the objector would in effect be adding that, since it was not wrong to burn more coal, and then more oil and gas as well, it would be incorrect to say that our ancestors are morally responsible for the fossil-­fuel regime and its effects. They are causally responsible, but since no wrong was done, ­there is no moral responsibility. The pure fairness argument grants this: causal responsibility, yes; but no moral responsibility, b­ ecause no wrong specified (or even alleged), and therefore no fault.17 The fact remains that the accumulated effects of the fossil-­fuel regime have long been undermining the climate and thereby undermining h ­ uman economies and socie­ties. Therefore, it is vital that humanity close down the fossil-­ fuel regime and make the transition to a safe energy regime—­and quickly. A rapid transition to a sustainable energy regime w ­ ill

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have substantial costs.18 Energy-­poor developing countries, for instance, must be enabled to the greatest extent pos­si­ble to leapfrog over carbon-­based energy to noncarbon energy, b ­ ecause their carbon emissions ­will exceed the remaining carbon bud­get if they follow the same high-­polluting path originally taken by the now-­ developed countries. Instead of building more gas pipelines on the basis of the corporate myth that gas is a necessary “bridge,” we need to build more nimble electricity grids with large storage capacities and artificial intelligence to manage flows of solar and wind energy.19 Coal miners and their families who are being abandoned by the executives of the coal companies for which they faithfully worked, with their health care and pensions left unfunded and their communities polluted, while the coal executives award themselves obscene amounts of severance pay, o ­ ught to be cared for or retrained by the rest of us.20 The manufacture of gasoline-­burning cars must be replaced as fast as pos­si­ble by the manufacture of cars that do not burn fossil fuel, and so on. The unavoidable question is, who is ­going to pay for the urgent transition between unsafe and safe energy regimes? If the transition is to occur, someone must shoulder the costs. Jules Coleman put the general issue crisply: “Who bears losses in the absence of fault”?21 And the moral aspect of the question is, what is a fair allocation of ­these payments? On whom is it fair for ­these costs to fall? This is a question neither of retributive justice nor compensatory justice, but of distributive justice—­basic fairness. Instead of an analogy of crime and punishment, consider a better analogy that acknowledges that all parties are faultless, although this analogy is inevitably still highly oversimplified.22 Four of us need to walk across a small desert, and we each have one trunk. We can find only one camel, so we decide to load all four trunks on this camel. Unknown to us, this camel can only carry three trunks. Three of us place our trunks on the camel without incident, but when the fourth adds her trunk, the camel breaks down. Now none of us are able to make the trip.

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Two observations about this ­little adventure, while literally true as far as they go, are deeply misleading, but a third is more insightful. The first observation is that the first three trunks loaded onto the camel produced no harm to the camel. The second observation is that it was the fourth trunk that caused the camel to break down. But each observation is so partial that it distorts. It is true that it was the fourth trunk that caused the camel to break down and that the camel would have been fine carry­ing the first three trunks. But the camel broke down ­because he was asked to carry four trunks, not the fourth trunk alone. The fourth trunk caused the camel to break down only ­because he was already bearing the first three. It may be that in one sense “the first three trunks loaded onto the camel produced no harm,” but they prepared the way—­created the conditions—­for the harm to occur: they created the situation in which the fourth trunk would do damage by exhausting the camel’s capability. It was four trunks that brought down the camel: the first, the second, and the third, as well as the fourth. The further analogy of a bud­get may also be helpful h ­ ere: the weight “bud­get” for using this camel without harm turned out to have been three trunks; while the first three trunks did not crush the camel, they exhausted the no-­harm “bud­get.” The weight of the first three trunks is why the camel was broken by the fourth. The fourth was the precipitating cause of the breakdown, but it is very far from the w ­ hole explanation. The first three travelers whose trunks exhausted the camel’s carry­ing capacity did nothing wrong when they placed their trunks on the camel’s back. The story grants an assumption parallel to the objector’s contention in the case of the energy regime and climate change that no one in the early generations of the Industrial Revolution was committing a crime by burning fossil fuels (leaving aside the deaths from the air pollution from coal burning, which was understood, but ignored, long before climate change was well understood). The first three travelers committed no crime, are without fault, and do not deserve any punishment. If

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they take responsibility jointly with the fourth traveler for making some satisfactory arrangement to deal with all four trunks, they are not confessing that they are villains in the story. They are simply acknowledging that they too are fully and irremovably part of the explanation of the outcome. The first three travelers “own” the outcome as much as the fourth. The explanation for why the fourth traveler has no way to move her trunk must include the first three travelers. Even if neither bad intent nor foresight was involved, the actions of the first three contributed crucially to the bad results. While not villains, the travelers are still accountable agents. And all four travelers together are accountable for breaking the camel’s back even though they are equally faultless. To some, it may seem unfair that the first three travelers should have to bear a burden ­because they performed a perfectly innocent act with no bad intent. That may seem unfair, but it is only unfortunate—­and unfortunate for all concerned. The fourth traveler also performed a perfectly innocent act with no bad intent. What would be unfair is if the fourth traveler alone had to shoulder the loss of the camel. A world that contained stronger camels would have been a more fortunate world for desert travelers. A planet on which CO2 did not block heat from escaping through our atmosphere would have been a more fortunate planet for ­humans who wanted to burn coal. But camels carry what they can, and the planet’s atmospheric chemistry works the way it works. The emissions/trunks placed on the climate/camel have not all been the same size. This is a further complication. It seems reasonable that every­one who is accountable for the bad outcome of accelerating climate change ­ought to share proportionally the costs of developing alternative energy so that we can stop burning coal, oil, and gas very, very soon. China’s and India’s pre­sent and ­future emissions are a prob­lem only ­because of the United States’ and the Eu­ro­pean Union’s past (and pre­sent and ­future) emissions—­and of course now increasingly China’s and India’s own past emissions.

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The four dif­fer­ent travelers are obviously the analogues of the vari­ous nations who in vari­ous time-­periods created and expanded the fossil-­fuel regime. Even if one assumes that ­every generation in each nation simply meant well and was trying to improve their own lives and the lives of their ­children, they each contributed to the creation of a profoundly dangerous prob­lem: rapidly worsening climate change. They acted without fault, but they caused a severe threat that it ­will be expensive to control. The costs of an energy revolution away from fossil fuels must be paid. It is unfortunate that this is so, but if the costs are to be covered, some ­people must pay. On whom is it least unfair that this burden should fall? The camel story suggests that e­ very nation whose e­ arlier generations contributed to the prob­lem should contribute to the solution in proportion to their contribution to the prob­lem. Why? B ­ ecause this outcome is proportional to their actions and their choices. In this re­spect, it is their outcome—­they “own” it even though they did not foresee it. Responsible agents acknowledge what they do, including the consequences they did not foresee and would not have chosen, as the epigraph from Václav Havel’s letter from prison suggests. Other potential agents also may not have foreseen and would not have chosen the ­actual results, but the difference between ­those other agents and ­these agents is that ­these agents brought about ­these results. ­These are their results, and they are accountable for them even though they may not deserve to be blamed or criticized for them. To refuse even to acknowledge them, as the US federal government has refused to acknowledge the size of the Unites States’ role in the history of the emergence of climate change, is deeply dishonest—an evasive attempt to disown consequences that one has in fact produced. Someone must unfortunately pay to deal with a prob­lem that has been created. Industrializers have faultlessly made a mess—­who ­ought to clean it up? The issue is fairness, not blame. The four travelers in the camel story did nothing wrong in loading on what they did not realize w ­ ere backbreaking trunks, and the early industrializers did

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nothing wrong in relying on a pro­cess that they did not know was combustion producing climate-­undermining carbon emissions. Unforeseen difficulties arose from innocent actions; this happens all the time. The question then is, who is it fairest to expect to sort out the resulting difficulties—­innocent noncontributors or innocent contributors? One could argue that since all are innocent, and no one is to blame, the choice of ­people to deal with the prob­lem might as well be random: flip coins or hold a lottery. That attitude, however, would best fit a disjointed world in which past, pre­sent, and f­ uture w ­ ere not connected in meaningful ways, and each morning saw an entirely new world in which all options ­were equally open. For a random world, random procedures might seem appropriate—­why not? However, in a world with continuities in which the pre­sent does not merely occur a­ fter the past, but flows out of it, and the ­future does not simply happen next ­after the pre­sent, but is partly ­shaped by pre­sent actions and choices, it seems far more appropriate—­more in tune with real­ity—to acknowledge the continuities by accepting accountability for the ­actual results of what members of one’s own community have in fact done. One can sometimes truthfully say, “I never meant this to happen,” while acknowledging correctly that this happened ­because of what one did as a result of one’s own choices. If “this” is a mess, simply to walk away from it is to act as if the connection between us and it did not exist or meant nothing. Walking away is evasive and dishonest ­because it does not face the fact of national connection and of national continuity with both contribution and outcome. The pure fairness argument concludes, then, that since some individuals must pay to deal with climate change, it is fairer that they be the con­temporary and ­future compatriots of ­those who created the carbon energy regime and climate change. Individuals are accountable for the bad results as well as the good results of their own nation’s energy history. If a share in the national wealth generated belongs to them, the corresponding portion of the climate damage generated belongs to them too.

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The Wrongful Imposition Arguments

We turn now from the results of the agency of individual members of one’s own nation-­state to the results of the agency of the corporate entity, the sovereign state, itself—­the consequences of national policies. I w ­ ill write mainly in terms of the policies of sovereign states, but it is worth bearing in mind that the world’s largest fossil-­fuel firms are all state-­owned and in this re­spect part of a sovereign state. Saudi Aramco’s policies are policies of the Saudi state, just as Gazprom’s policies are policies of the Rus­sian state, and Sinopec’s are policies of the Chinese state. While sovereign states readily claim the wealth resulting from national industrialization, they do not readily claim the damage resulting. In fact, the early industrializing nations that t­ oday count as developed have clung to the wealth produced by their respective Industrial Revolutions, but some—­most loudly and insistently for the quarter of a c­ entury of climate negotiations, the US federal government—­ have treated the prob­lems produced as shared by all, beneficiaries and nonbeneficiaries alike. Climate change is treated as a global responsibility in spite of the fact that the bulk of the CO2 emissions ­were u ­ ntil recently produced by the minority consisting of the now-­wealthiest nations in the pro­cess of generating their own national wealth. In recent de­cades, China has become the largest source of emissions—­and a far larger source than it needs to be.23 When one retains most of the benefits from a pro­cess and sheds as much of the costs as pos­si­ble, one’s net benefits are greater than if one shoulders all the costs of one’s own enrichment. And if o ­ thers who bear some of ­those costs do not also receive at least the same amount of benefits as of costs, they are made absolutely worse off than they would have been if one had done nothing. A firm’s maximizing its gains by minimizing its costs through leaving all the environmental, health, and other prob­lems it creates to be handled by society is a phenomenon that economists call “externalization.” Since the term accurately indicates the movement of dismissal, ejection, or alienation, I ­will retain it but focus

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on dif­f er­ent aspects of the pro­cess and suggest quite dif­f er­ent reasons for condemning it.24 So far as pos­si­ble, a purely self-­interested firm controlling a productive pro­cess owns the good products and disowns the bad products, such as pollution and disease, which become in economistic jargon “negative externalities.” The selling price of the good product does not incorporate the cost of dealing with the negative externalities, b ­ ecause they are simply not dealt with, but are dumped onto society as a w ­ hole. This makes products cheaper to buy, easier to sell, and so usually more profitable. From the point of view of society as a w ­ hole, it is irrational to allow such externalization at the level of firms, b ­ ecause self-­interested firms have no incentive to avoid endlessly creating environmental and health prob­lems, which cost them nothing, from which o ­ thers ­will suffer, and for which ­others ­will have to pay if and when the prob­lems are cleaned up. A basic function of good government, even for advocates of small government, is to design incentives and regulations in such a way as to drive the internalization of the costs of negative externalities so that ­those who purchase a product pay a price that covers the prevention of, or the remedy for, the prob­lems that would other­wise be created and dispersed by the product’s creation and sale. By exactly the same reasoning at a more general level, from the point of view of humanity as a ­whole, it is irrational to allow externalization at the level of nations, ­because purely self-­interested nations—­nations pursuing exclusively their own national interest—­ have no incentive to avoid creating environmental and health prob­ lems from which the rest of humanity ­will suffer and for which the rest w ­ ill have to pay. I w ­ ill call this “sovereign externalization,” and the creation of global climate change, when combined with a refusal now to fund the initiatives necessary to stop it, is a monumental example of sovereign externalization in action. The current system of sovereign states encourages sovereign externalization—­ externalization at the level of the nation—­and, in addition, makes it difficult to resist, even though from the perspective of humanity

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as a w ­ hole, especially ­future generations, allowing such negative sovereign externalities is wildly irrational. Amitav Ghosh captures this picture beautifully: “That ultimate instance of discontinuity: the nation-­state.”25 In the case of climate, the would-be externalization may also be self-­defeating at the national level ­because the undermining of the global climate damages ­every nation and the world economy, on which national economies depend. Years ago, the eminent geophysical scientist David Archer put the fundamental point lucidly: economics “is a description of the way that money, the lifeblood of our economic system, ­really flows, analogous to the statement that ­water flows downhill. Money flows ­toward short-­term gain, and ­toward over-­exploitation of un­regu­la­ted common resources. Th ­ ese tendencies are like the invisible hand of fate, guiding the hero in a Greek tragedy t­ oward his inevitable doom. Our understanding of economics tells us that the ­free hand of the market, also known as business-­as-­usual, w ­ ill not cope gracefully with the threat of global warming. Ultimately the question may come down to ethics, rather than economics.”26 The ­earlier fairness argument already showed that it is unfair to refuse to participate in shouldering one’s nation’s proportionate share of the costs of a remedy for a prob­lem to which one’s compatriots past and pre­sent have as individuals contributed even unknowingly and faultlessly. The wrongful imposition arguments ­will now show why what I am labeling national policies of negative sovereign externalization are, in addition to being irrational and destructive from the perspective of humanity as a w ­ hole (and in the case of climate, self-­defeating to a considerable degree at the national level), also a moral outrage well beyond the unfairness already shown by the ­earlier argument. So far, I have mostly spoken loosely of the “costs” created by climate change, but ­there are costs and costs. That is, the carbon energy regime (1) generates economic costs that arise from damage that may not constitute wrongful harm and (2) generates

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fundamental wrongful harms, which of course also have their own attendant economic costs (assaulting someone is wrong in that it violates her right to physical security, but it may also generate medical costs for her, her medical insurance com­pany, and her national health system). Burning coal, for example, produces air pollution containing particulate ­matter, toxic chemicals that attack lungs and blacken historical buildings, and “acid rain” that blights forests, as well as the deaths of miners. Coal burning creates, among other damage, the need to wash and repair the surfaces of the buildings and install “scrubbers” in smokestacks to protect forests. The cost of restoring historic buildings is one large cost of coal combustion.27 But the toxic chemicals in the air pollution that comes from burning coal also violate ­human rights by causing ­people to develop vari­ous lung diseases, including cancers, many of which are fatal. Causing someone to develop a fatal lung disease, especially so as to increase the profitability of one’s business by sloughing off the costs of controlling one’s own pollution, is inflicting a wrongful harm. Such lung diseases then add massively to the national economic costs of health care, but they most importantly violate the basic right to physical security against the infliction of fatal physical harms. So coal burning generates both ordinary economic costs that may not constitute wrongful harms and clear wrongful harms like violations of the right to bodily integrity, which are accompanied by their own further economic costs. For shorthand, I w ­ ill refer respectively to t­ hese two kinds of costs simply as “ordinary costs” and “wrongful harms.” Much more could be said about the difference, but the relevant distinction h ­ ere is that the imposition of ordinary costs is not in itself wrong in the same way that the infliction of rights-­violating harms clearly is. This difference between ordinary costs and wrongful harms underlies a distinction in the moral significance of two analytically separable ele­ments of negative sovereign externalization, which dumps both costs and harms from the creation of national wealth upon the rest of the world.

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Observing this distinction requires wrongful imposition arguments, in turn, to branch into two versions. A. Wrong ful harms: violating h ­ uman rights. The main players in the carbon energy regime are contributing to wrongful harms by violating basic ­human rights.28 As explained above, the burning of coal, cloaked as a necessity, has for centuries been violating the right to physical security, or bodily integrity, by polluting the air that p ­ eople must breathe with carcinogenic and other toxic and other­wise damaging substances. And the combustion of all fossil fuels—­coal, oil, and gas—is now violating the right to physical security by forcing climate change that brings deadly floods, deadly wildfires, deadly storm surges, deadly heat waves, migration of deadly disease vectors like mosquitos and ticks, and other fatal manifestations of a progressively disrupted climate. The chain of causation from combustion to climate instability is complex, although increasingly well understood. The moral situation h ­ ere, however, is entirely straightforward.29 When one is violating rights, especially basic rights, one’s duty is to stop entirely as soon as pos­si­ble, bearing oneself what­ ever costs are involved. A commitment to rights entails a commitment to ­human solidarity to at least this extent, and the only good excuse for not desisting from the rights violations for which one is responsible is genuine necessity. When ­there ­were no affordable alternatives to fossil fuels, t­ here may have been a period in which an excuse of necessity applied to the infliction of the harms they caused. But ­those days are long gone, and the combustion of fossil fuels has now become in fact an “avoidable necessity” ­because alternative energy sources are readily affordable and increasingly accessible.30 Any accompanying benefits that accrue to t­ hose whose rights are ­violated do nothing to mitigate the wrong. Collateral benefits do not balance violations of rights. B. Ordinary costs: taking unfair advantage. Are such direct ­human rights violations the only costs that are of moral concern? When the costs externalized, or dumped, are ordinary costs, and not inherently wrongful harms, is inflicting them on the remainder

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of humanity acceptable? No, the sovereign externalization of ordinary costs is also morally dubious in that it imposes costs on ­people of other nations arbitrarily: costs to which they have not consented and against which they are defenseless (and of which they are in many cases unaware). It is thus contemptuous of their dignity and disrespectful of their autonomy. Even if ­these costs ­were accompanied by collateral benefits g­ reat enough to create net benefit, it would still be unacceptable simply to force a par­tic­ u­lar package of costs and benefits upon p ­ eople who w ­ ere unable to decide for themselves ­whether to agree to it (in some cases ­because they w ­ ere unaware of its terms). Even a net beneficial package may be incompatible with their own proj­ects, plans, and way of life. Worse, when the externalization of costs imposes a net cost on another nation that was already worse off than the sovereign state engaging in the externalizing, the imposition of costs is especially objectionable ­because it coercively worsens international in­equality. Inevitably, to some extent most of humanity has benefited to some degree from the industrial socie­ties in the “developed” nations—­I am not assuming that the benefits of the industrialization pro­cess have been entirely retained inside industrial socie­ ties. But t­ here certainly has not been a general distribution of benefits, while t­ here has been a complete global distribution of the ­environmental costs and harms by way of the dynamics of the climate system. Once GHGs enter the atmosphere, oceans, soils, and vegetation, they circulate generally around the planet, and the emissions that enter the atmosphere produce effects that are worldwide, although not uniform. The lack of uniformity, however, bears no relation to the original source of the emissions; for example, temperatures are rising most rapidly in the Arctic and Antarctic, but the emissions causing this “polar enhancement” of temperature do not originate at the poles. In fact, a common complaint made about climate change by ordinary ­people across the world is that benefits from fossil fuels and costs of climate change are misaligned with each other.31 Who

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suffers the costs of climate change, for example, the costs of trying to adapt to sea-­level rise, bears no relation at all to who receives the benefits from the emissions causing the sea-­level rise. One might initially think that this is simply b ­ ecause as a m ­ atter of physical fact the climate changes do not occur where the emissions are released, but instead, for example, emissions from the temperate zones produce melting in the Arctic and the Antarctic. However, while the location of the physical changes themselves is determined by the complex dynamics of the climate system, the distribution of the costs for dealing with this physical damage is the result of the workings of a social institution. This distribution of the costs, as distinguished from the physical damage, of climate change is mainly the result of a parochial and inward-­looking ­human institution, namely the sovereign state, that ignores global physical dynamics and po­liti­cally allows emitters shielded b ­ ehind national bound­aries to claim accountability for, and thus owner­ ship of, the benefits of emissions while washing their hands of accountability for and owner­ship of the damage done. The distribution of the benefits and the distribution of the costs are clearly disproportionate. Can someone provide a compelling rationale for why most costs of damage caused by emissions o ­ ught to be publicly shared while most benefits produced by emissions may be privately retained? This is, on a global level, exactly the kind of externalization that economists regularly observe is irrational at the system level domestically and creates perverse incentives in domestic economies when practiced by firms—­this is arbitrary externalization by sovereign states.32 Most importantly, it is deeply unfair. Why should humanity generally suffer the ill-­effects of activities that they did not conduct, did not consent to have conducted, and may not benefit from to an extent commensurate with the costs they suffer? The unfairness is especially severe when the damage from climate change is inflicted on defenseless p ­ eople. I have emphasized that “­every state is a ‘failed state’ as far as climate is concerned.”33 Even sovereign states cannot effectively defend their citizens against

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the effects of emissions from other sovereign states—­victimized states can only try to adapt to what they suffer at the hands of other states. For now, sovereignty protects the sources of the damage but not its vulnerable victims.34 The fundamental argument, then, is not at all that the historically greatest emitters have somehow emitted too much by emitting more than some proper share judged by some contentious standard, such as equal per capita emissions. Instead, the fundamental argument ­here is that emitters claim owner­ship of many benefits of their emissions while arbitrarily renouncing accountability for many costs of the very same activities.35 Such accounting is misleading at a deep level about a state’s own identity and its ­actual historical role and constructs a skewed and self-­servingly positive interpretation of what it has done by acknowledging only the good and omitting all the bad in its understanding of itself. This is one-­sided accountability: own the good and disown the bad. This is a distortedly partial picture of how one’s nation has been behaving in the world. More importantly, this is disrespectful to every­one outside the national borders of any significant emitter and unfair to ­those who suffer a net cost, worst of all if they ­were worse off already before suffering the imposed additional costs. The externalization of costs by power­ful states is especially objectionable in the cases when they worsen the extent of international in­equality in a morally unacceptable way rather than providing a net benefit. The standard I appeal to ­here is a relatively undemanding one: the avoidance of extremes of in­equality consisting of benefits for some and net costs for ­others, imposed by ­human social practices like the systematic externalization of costs by sovereign states. In exactly which conditions is the infliction of more extreme in­equality unacceptable?36 On the one hand, if a country comes up with some pro­cess that makes itself better off, but ­either does nothing to improve the position of any other country, or improves the position of one or more other countries somewhat but not as much as it improves its own position, the extent of international in­equality increases. But ­there

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may be nothing wrong, other ­things being equal, with sometimes making yourself, and only yourself, better off, even though this ­will indeed increase the degree to which you are better off than ­those who ­were already worse off than you. The respective absolute levels of well-­being are relevant to the limits on when this is acceptable, but t­ hese are complexities we must leave aside h ­ ere.37 On the other hand, if a state improves its own position by a pro­cess that not only does not provide any net benefit to ­others but instead inflicts net costs on them without their consent, making them absolutely worse off than they ­were, as the state itself becomes absolutely better off than it was, and the ­others are helpless to shield themselves against its infliction of ­these costs upon them, making the infliction purely coercive, the state has unilaterally and coercively increased the extent of in­equality between itself and them. This is patently objectionable and deeply disrespectful. In cases in which the externalizer of costs makes other nations absolutely worse off without their consent and perhaps even without their knowledge, in order to make itself absolutely better off, the state has at worst treated that other part of the world entirely as a means to its own ends and at best shown ­those outsiders no re­spect. This is a paradigm case of a stronger party silently exploiting the vulnerability of a weaker party in order to pursue its own advantage. In Thucydides’s immortal description, “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”38 That such “power-­plays” are currently standard practice in international affairs does nothing to make them less unsavory. It is a willingness to protect the vulnerable instead of exploiting or ignoring them that makes a society—­including an international society—­ civilized. Exploiting or ignoring vulnerable outsiders displays contempt for ­human solidarity. At best, the coercive and unilateral imposition of greater disadvantages by means of worsening the absolute position of o ­ thers shows a complete lack of re­spect for them and their own ends. Viewed as a systemic practice with distributive consequences, such structurally imposed in­equality produces a result with exactly

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the same shape that would come from re­distribution directly from the worse off to the better off. In the case of carbon emissions that undermine the climate for o ­ thers, the net reduction in the o ­ thers’ well-­being is the result of the creation of new costs for them as they face the destabilized climate rather than the literal removal of some asset from them for re­distribution upward. But they still become absolutely and relatively worse off if the source of the emissions retains the bulk of the benefits and sheds the bulk of the costs of the enterprises generating the emissions. When the Chinese government pressures a poorer country to accept a Chinese-­built coal-­burning power plant as part of the ­Belt and Road Initiative, when that country could have been provided with a renewable energy source instead, ­because this benefits the incumbent Chinese government in the short term by providing employment for Chinese workers in po­liti­cally influential but technologically backward Chinese state firms that are only capable of building coal-­burning plants, the Chinese government maintains po­liti­cal stability for itself by inflicting upon the rest of the world severely climate-­worsening infrastructure that can be expected to undermine the climate with carbon emissions for forty to fifty years—­until around 2060 or 2070 if put into ser­vice in 2020.39 The same is of course true, to a lesser degree, of the US federal government’s indulgence of utilities that refuse to retire gas-­ burning generation: for (relatively small and short-­term) benefits for domestic constituents (specifically, for the firms with vested interests in obsolete gas technology and for the politicians who receive their campaign contributions), it imposes (large and long-­ term) costs on every­one ­else (and long-­term on itself as well, since the policy is self-­defeatingly irrational).40 ­These are con­temporary continuations of the historical pattern of coercive and unilateral imposition of worse international inequalities. When the US Department of State declared in 2018 that it “­will not allow climate agreements to be used as a vehicle to redistribute wealth,” what it actually did was very dif­fer­ent from what it said it was ­doing. It was refusing to acknowledge our responsibility

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as Americans for the contribution made by the emissions from our own industrialization to the climate changes throughout the planet. Myopic statements from the US federal government over the last quarter ­century during international negotiations concerning climate change have adamantly insisted that all wealth currently controlled by the United States is beyond all doubt rightfully held and that any difficulties with the changing climate faced by anyone ­else anywhere in the world, including all the poorer nations who have still not industrialized to this day, are entirely their own prob­lem, with any request for assistance being an underhanded attempt to “redistribute” what rightfully belongs to Americans. This is a preposterously simplistic and distorting position that erases the complexities of the real history and reflects no inkling of solidarity with—or even re­spect for—­the rest of the ­human race.41 On the one hand, if it is wrong for the power­ful to take advantage of the powerless by imposing greater inequalities, then countries like the United States o ­ ught to correct the historic wrong by reversing this in­equality at least to the extent to which they imposed it through externalization of the costs of their own industrialization on ­others who ­were already worse off. The most relevant way of implementing this correction is by contributing to the costs of bringing climate change u ­ nder control, that is, taking on the very “burdens or financial pledges in support of the Paris Agreement” that the US federal government arrogantly renounced. On the other hand, even if ­there somehow w ­ ere nothing wrong with the power­ful having taken advantage of the powerless de­cade ­after de­cade by releasing national emissions into the shared air, land, and sea—if the wrongful imposition argument ­were misguided—­the case would simply revert to pure fairness, the first of this chapter’s three arguments. The costs of bringing ­under control the climate change caused by t­ hose emissions must be paid, so someone must bear t­ hese costs. On whom could it possibly be fairer for ­those costs to fall than on ­those who contributed

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to causing the prob­lem, held on to the bulk of the benefits of ­doing so, and allowed much of the costs to fall upon o ­ thers who benefited less? As I noted twenty years ago, “If ­there ­were an in­equality between two groups of ­people such that members of the first group could create prob­lems and then expect members of the second group to deal with the prob­lems, that in­equality would be incompatible with equal re­spect and equal dignity. For the members of the second group would in fact be functioning as servants for the first group.”42 To insist on retaining benefits while refusing to bear the burdens created by the same pro­cess can only be unalloyed greed devoid of re­spect for anyone who is not a compatriot. Conclusion

Other ­things being equal, it seems clearly fairer for ­those who have contributed most to the creation of a prob­lem to bear much more of the burden of dealing with the prob­lem than ­those who have contributed least. Moreover, other ­things being equal, it is evidently fairer for t­ hose who have benefited most from the creation of a prob­lem to bear much more of the burden of dealing with it than t­ hose who have benefited least. While the pre­sent descendants of ­those who contributed most to the creation of the polluting carbon regime did not themselves contribute to its creation, we are contributing to its perpetuation in the pre­sent and to the worsening of climate change in the f­ uture, insofar as we simply use the inherited energy regime and do l­ ittle to transition beyond it; and we enjoy the benefits (and the ability to pay43) inherited by pre­sent members of the nations whose ­earlier members did create the prob­lem. It may seem unfair that any generation should have to bear the burden of fundamentally restructuring the global energy regime. When James Watt designed the steam engine in 1784—­ the event from which Paul Crutzen dated our entry into the Anthropocene44—­burning coal seemed simply to be an ingenious

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way of generating copious amounts of steam and thereby unpre­ ce­dented amounts of energy. Who knew that coal would turn out to be the most climate-­disruptive source of energy available? But it turns out that the CO2 from fossil fuels that reaches the atmosphere holds in unwanted heat that used to escape from the planet, so we have no choice but to stop injecting the CO2. This requires an expensive transition between energy regimes, and someone ­will have to pay. The fundamental contention h ­ ere is that what has happened between 1784 and t­ oday is very nearly the most unfair pro­cess imaginable and cries out for a robust correction. One portion of humanity—­the “Developed States”—­has reaped the vast majority of the benefits from the invention of the steam engine and the Industrial Revolution generally while allowing the costs, including rights-­violating harms and increasing inequalities, to be spread globally. Most individuals ­will suffer from climate change, although not uniformly and not in any proportion to their contribution to causing it. It is perhaps unfair that the benefits have been narrowly held while the costs have been widely disbursed. It is certainly deeply unfair that the benefits have been narrowly held by ­those who have inflicted the damage on every­one, while the costs, including severe harms—­such as loss of life, health, or home—­ descend randomly upon all. The heart of what is objectionable is, if you like, a specific conjunction of benefit from the prob­lem, contribution to the prob­lem, and infliction of harm: ­those who are the source of the dangers from the disrupted climate suffer least from ­those dangers and keep more of the benefits from the activities that are disrupting the climate by failing to shoulder the costs of what must be done to head off the far worse dangers inherent in the per­sis­tence of the now-­dominant carbon energy regime. It would be difficult to concoct a more strikingly unfair arrangement than the energy-­business-­as-­usual. Contribution to solving the prob­lem ­ought to bear some relation to contribution to creating the prob­lem, especially when t­ hose who have in fact created the prob­lem have benefited so handsomely from ­doing

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so and ­those who suffer most have made ­little or no contribution to the prob­lem. It is unfortunate that anyone must pay, but granted that someone must, the best that we can do is to assign the costs to t­ hose whom it is fairest to charge from among t­ hose who are in fact available to be charged. Some third-­party payer— an imaginary philanthropic foundation from a distant planet, perhaps—­would be preferable to ­either of the real choices. But it would be outrageously unfair if ­those of us who thus far in our lives may have captured, perhaps inadvertently, the benefits of our industrial society while continuing generally to disburse the harms should now knowingly insist on continuing to cling to the maximal benefits from massive carbon emissions while inflicting maximal harms on ­people generally by refusing to bear a substantial share of the costs of escaping the energy regime that is disrupting the climate while benefiting and enriching us. We would be twisting inadvertent unfairness into conscious exploitation. The Owl of Minerva has flown—we can see exactly what we are d ­ oing if we do not avert our eyes. One government whose approach to climate change seems to express such conscious exploitation of the rest of the world has been the US federal one. US efforts so far on climate change at the federal level have always been pathetically weak—­under the Trump Administration, they w ­ ere hostile to humanity outside the United States and generally perverse. It is past time for the US national government to become fully serious about reducing carbon pollution, and initially we need to know only this: who ­ought to act now. We can l­ater figure out when vari­ous parties have done enough and give them credit for any past per­for­mance in reducing their contribution to the threat once the worst dangers are averted. We do not need rankings among governments of their contribution to the prob­lem; and arguments about who is worse than whom can at this point easily become a dangerous distraction, which entertains theorists but confuses the public. Many other governments—­notably the Chinese, Rus­sian, and Brazilian—­also need to do vastly more than they are ­doing.

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My argument is basically a consistency argument about fairness. The federal government of the United States, like many national governments, claims for its pre­sent and ­future citizens most of the fruits of the activities of its past citizens—it claims national owner­ship of, for instance, the benefits of the industrialization of the United States, including the vast infrastructure and capital left b ­ ehind. In consistency, if most of the benefits of the past belong to the United States, so should the corresponding costs. But one very significant cost, the enormous damage done to the stability of the global climate system by carbon pollution, has in fact been socialized universally. The ­people of all nations and all generations are increasingly suffering the effects of the vast GHG emissions produced by the pro­cess of US industrialization and the continuing maintenance of US postindustrial society. Similar evasions of accountability by other governments, like the Chinese, Rus­sian, and Brazilian, excuse no one, them or us.

3 Engagement across Distance and Engagement across Time Any man’s death diminishes me, ­because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.1 The next few de­cades offer a brief win­dow of opportunity to minimize large-­scale and potentially catastrophic climate change that ­will extend longer than the entire history of ­human civilization thus far.2 We are scientists who have been studying the Amazon and all its wondrous assets for many de­cades. ­Today, we stand exactly in a moment of destiny: The tipping point is ­here, it is now.3 India’s poor have rights that can be satisfied only through economic development4—­only by, for one ­thing, making electricity available to the hundreds of millions of Indians whose “energy poverty” extends to the extreme of having no access at all to

58

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electricity. But massive burning of the world’s dirtiest coal, which is the most plentiful source of energy that India has in the past had the infrastructure to exploit, makes the air in major Indian cities more polluted than even the notoriously polluted air of Beijing, and in addition greatly reduces the odds of limiting climate change across the globe to levels that ­will not be dangerous for billions of p ­ eople across many generations. What should be done? How much of it, if any, is a prob­lem for t­ hose of us who live in a wealthy country? Do we share in the responsibility to find a way out of India’s dilemma? If so, why? And how much? This chapter w ­ ill show concretely in the case of climate change that both international justice and intergenerational justice rest upon h ­ uman relationships that are far less distant than assumed by conventional thought and established practices. Causal webs tightly link persons across both space and time. Both the fossil-­fuel energy regime that is driving climate change and the mea­sures necessary to make the transition from that regime into an alternative energy regime impinge deeply upon the well-­being of contemporaries who have chosen neither the regime nor the transition, linking them across space to ­those who control the regime and the fate of the transition. Similarly, the fates of persons in the distant ­future are in the hands of p ­ eople living now b ­ ecause in the case of the climate system the date-­of-­last-­opportunity to prevent disasters from becoming irreversible often occurs de­cades or even centuries ­earlier than the start of the disaster itself. This is powerfully illustrated by the evident irreversibility of the melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which ­will ultimately produce catastrophic rises in sea level across the globe, affecting hundreds of millions of ­people. Some responsibilities of international and intergenerational justice are entirely forward-­looking and completely in­de­pen­dent of the historical responsibilities based on past contributions to climate change that we have just examined in chapter 2. The applicability and strength of other responsibilities to do international and intergenerational justice, by contrast, rest on ­those historical

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contributions to the prob­lem. A main goal of this chapter is to lay out clearly where such connections do and do not hold. The Phenomenology of Agency

In a probing 1995 exploration, Samuel Scheffler suggested that our inherited conception of responsibility rests in part on what he called “a complex phenomenology of agency”: a set of assumptions about what m ­ atters about what we do and do not do.5 Specifically, he saw that among the concepts deeply ingrained in our understanding of the world are the following two assumptions: the near effects of our acts are more impor­tant ethically than the remote effects, and the effects we produce as individuals are more impor­tant ethically than the effects we produce as members of a group. The first assumption, I think, reflects its origins in somewhat less globalized times, although we should not exaggerate the simplicity of e­ arlier times.6 That the near effects of one’s actions are more significant than the remote effects made sense in e­ arlier centuries when in fact one’s most power­ful influence—­for most ­people most of the time, one’s only influence—­was local. In t­ hose times, if one wanted to have some effect on ­people elsewhere than where one lived, one needed to go to that other place in order to act t­ here. Now a person’s green­house gas emissions over the course of her life in Ireland contribute to the sea-­level rise on the coast of Africa, and a tweet from Peru can cause a riot in Moldova. The second assumption, that the effects one produces acting alone are ethically more significant than the effects one produces as a member of a group, was, I suspect, never entirely true ­because, apart from utter hermits, individuals are normally embedded in communities—­even homeless ­people and refugees affect ­others. The conventional assumption may be largely explained by individualistic ideological commitments. It is not true that the effects of what one does by oneself are always more impor­tant than the effects of one’s participation in institutions and practices like being a lifelong customer in a consumer society based on the

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energy from fossil fuels, which is burned in the production of consumer items, the transportation of consumer items, and the use of consumer items.7 Climate change is indeed a ­giant example of remote—­indeed, planetary—­effects that are also the group effects of individuals participating in an international energy regime that is dependent on coal, oil, and natu­ral gas. And climate change is a power­ful reason why we need to try to follow Scheffler’s early lead in rethinking our understanding of responsibility, which I hope this book ­will extend. Any normal person whose conception of herself extends beyond personal material comforts and psychological pleasures to include attachments to ­children and grandchildren and to practices and institutions—be they football or opera—­that endure across time and are likely to be enjoyed by ­children and grandchildren too has broadly self-­interested reasons for caring about climate change ­because of its potential to disrupt ordinary lives and the travel habits of both receivers and sopranos. Except for sociopaths who literally care only about themselves—­and even they should worry that they may find their ­house flooded or their food more expensive—­ordinary ­humans who care about at least some of the ­people and activities that survive them have good reason to take action to limit climate change in order to preserve what they value.8 But consider instead the billions of other p ­ eople, t­ hose individually unknown to us—in many cases, spatially distant—­for whom we have no reason to feel affection and whose activities and practices we may have no par­tic­u­lar reason to care about—­the vast majority of other ­people in the world. Do we in the wealthy countries have any responsibility ­toward them with regard to climate change? If so, why? And how much? The Danger of Transition

The Rus­sian federal government seems devoted mainly to increasing exports of gas and oil,9 and my own US federal government is for now largely immobilized by the votes of senators and

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congresspersons who appear to have been bought for blocking actions against climate initiatives by campaign contributions from fossil-­fuel interests,10 but most socie­ties are now to some degree engaged in some kind of effort to respond to climate change. So we need to reflect on both the climate prob­lem itself and the proposed responses, ­because of course ­every response to a prob­lem comes with its own prob­lems.11 We should consider any responsibilities we might have to distant strangers regarding ­either climate change itself or our responses to climate change. Recall two of the notorious general features of climate dangers. First, the distribution of the dangers bears no relation to the distribution of the benefits from the emissions that are causing the dangers. Sea-­level rise, for example, w ­ ill affect ­those who live near sea level—­thus, hundreds of millions in Bangladesh and India who do not even have electricity w ­ ill suffer from encroachment, flooding, and storm surges partly caused by electricity generation from coal. Second, the death tolls from storms are heavi­ly affected by the wealth of the society that suffers the storm: hurricanes that hit the United States kill relatively few p ­ eople—­sometimes no one—­ because buildings are sturdy, emergency broadcasts are effective, medical care is excellent, and so on—­while cyclones that hit the Philippines regularly have high death tolls.12 Anyone may be affected by climate change, but, generally speaking, the poor w ­ ill suffer the most. The dangers that ­will come from our response to the climate dangers may be less familiar, so it is worth noting them slightly less briefly. By far the most impor­tant f­ actor in causing climate change is the accumulation in the planet’s atmosphere of CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels. And it turns out that b ­ ecause CO2 remains in the atmosphere for almost unimaginably long times—­between roughly 10% and 25% of it stays for several hundred thousand years13—­the crucial f­ actor is the cumulative amount of CO2 emitted since around 1750, the vast bulk of which still remains in the atmosphere. The atmospheric physicists have established—­and

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t­ here is now very wide consensus on this—­that ­there is a fairly specific cumulative carbon bud­get for any par­tic­u­lar probability of not exceeding the pre–­Industrial Revolution temperature by any given number of degrees.14 An up-­to-­the-­second calculation of total cumulative CO2 is available.15 So if we are serious about even the unambitious goal of not exceeding a 2°C rise, it is critical for global emissions to peak and then start down sharply very soon, which is physically and technologically pos­si­ble. It simply has to be made po­liti­cally pos­si­ble by acts of determination and w ­ ill that unseat incumbent politicians blocking action. A sharp decline in emissions would push the date for exceeding the cumulative bud­get back further into the ­future. By about 2050, CO2 emissions from energy use must completely stop, which means humanity must exit the fossil fuel, or carbon, energy regime entirely and use nothing but alternative energy, that is, noncarbon energy—­anything but fossil fuel.16 This is ­because if we keep adding to the cumulative total, the atmospheric concentration must exceed the carbon bud­get for 2°C. This should all play out, then, well within the lifetime of the current under-­forty-­year-­olds. The next de­cades ­will be an amazing time to live on this planet, and no one should be bored. ­Today’s young w ­ ill witness one of history’s greatest strug­gles that ­w ill result in e­ ither one of humanity’s most glorious triumphs—­a successful Energy Revolution eliminating fossil fuels and their carbon emissions—or one of humanity’s most dismal failures, the triumph of the entrenched carbon energy regime, the leaders of which are resisting the needed transition with stealth, trickery, and lies,17 and the consequent coming of yet more dangerous climate change. What I want to highlight ­here are the dangers that come, not with the climate change itself, but with our response to it. Fossil fuels, especially coal, which is by far the worst for both carbon emissions and lethal surface-­level air pollution, need to be made extremely unattractive extremely fast—80% of the known reserves of coal must be left in the ground to avoid overshooting the goal of a rise in temperature of no more than 2°C.18 Governments could

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simply regulate further extraction of coal, oil, and gas and eventually ban it—­supply-­side measures—­but no demo­cratic government has so far had the guts to regulate fossil-­fuel use to save the climate, as was done through rationing, for instance, to save countries during World War II.19 So most of the proposals for reducing fossil-­fuel use involve po­liti­cal action to employ market mechanisms to make it more expensive ­until consumers themselves choose to turn away from it to other energy sources—­demand-­side mea­sures. It can be made more expensive in ­either of at least two ways: a carbon tax or so-­called cap-­and-­dividend. I have nothing to add ­here to the disputes among regulation of extraction, cap-­and-­dividend, and carbon tax, except the obvious point that po­liti­cal leaders need to face up to one or more immediately. If politicians can be pressured by concerned citizens into acting, fossil fuels ­will start to become more expensive, which is good as a means of reducing combustion. But this is where the danger for developing countries from the necessary response to the dangers of climate change begins. And this danger means that the response to climate change must not have only one dimension. The danger is disrupting development by depriving the poorest of the only energy source that they could u ­ ntil recently afford: fossil fuel. The low prices for fossil fuels in the past have been partly the result of two mistaken po­liti­cal policies. First, many poor country governments to this day heavi­ly subsidize fossil fuels as part of a grossly inefficient tactic to promote development, but the dangers of climate change make this a deeply misguided policy that needs to end immediately, even if it had been an efficient mechanism before we understood climate change. The world total of fossil-­fuel subsidies in 2015 was $4.7 trillion.20 Amazingly, G-20 governments liberally subsidize fossil fuels, with both producer subsidies and consumer subsidies, in spite of their rhe­toric in support of capping temperature rise.21 Second, the price of fossil fuel is as artificially low as it is also partly ­because extreme deficiency in po­liti­cal regulation has permitted most of its enormous health and environmental costs to be

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externalized, that is, not covered by the price for the purchasers of the energy but dumped upon society generally—we all pay for the hospital expenses of fellow citizens with lung and heart diseases from breathing the pollution from the burning of coal—­and dumped on beyond fellow citizens to humanity generally through the “sovereign externalization” that we considered in chapter 2. Neither a carbon tax nor cap-­and-­dividend might be necessary if the price of fossil fuel covered the huge health costs of the lung diseases and shortened life-­spans caused by the air pollution from coal burning and its monumental environmental costs, above all climate change itself, but also the despoliation of land and pollution of ­water from the extraction of all fossil fuels, including coal mining, especially strip mining, and fracking for both gas and oil, which both wastes and pollutes shared ­water supplies.22 Much of the environmental damage is hidden from the view of us in affluent countries b ­ ecause it is in the oceans or in the developing world, such as the gigantic mess Shell has left in Nigeria; the Niger Delta has been called “the most oil-­ravaged place on the planet.”23 Shell has failed for de­cades to clean up massive oil leaks, leading to the deaths in protests by the Nigerian p ­ eople against Shell’s inaction, which inspired Nnimmo Bassey’s poem: We thought it was oil But it was blood We thought it was oil But it was blood. They may kill all But the blood ­will speak.24 In general, politicians have given fossil-­fuel corporations by far the biggest ­free r­ ide from re­spect for the environment of any firms in ­human history—­plus tax breaks! Is it pos­si­ble that many politicians are bought and paid for?25 In any case, if governments belatedly act against climate change by pricing carbon through ­either carbon taxes or cap-­and-­dividend,

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the prices of fossil fuels ­will fi­nally rise, and what has in the past been the most affordable energy for the poorest ­will become more expensive, ­will specifically become unaffordable for many of the poor who can afford it now, and w ­ ill rise even farther out of reach for ­those who already cannot afford it. We have no choice but to limit climate change, but if governments do it by raising the market price and do nothing ­else, the implications for development are ominous. Plainly, then, we must not choose to price the poorest out of the energy market and simply leave them as helpless as we would have then made them. Efforts to limit climate change cannot be pursued in isolation. We must si­mul­ta­neously pursue complementary policies that avoid undermining development and forcing t­ hose who are already humanity’s worst off to become even worse off. Which policies? Con­temporary “Strangers” and the Affordability of Alternative Energy

Fairly evidently, it is our responsibility to protect the poorest from the results of our own choice of policy instruments—­for example, a po­liti­cally driven rise in fossil-­fuel prices—by supporting the rapid spread of alternative forms of energy by the most effective means available. This could mean, for example, feed-in tariffs, as used early on by Germany, or special tax concessions for entrepreneurs and/or early adopters of new technology, or increased research and development funds for universities, or subsidies for community electricity microgrids supplied by solar panels, or other techniques that a theorist like me should be the last person to advise about.26 The crucial constraint is that the alternative forms of energy must be made both accessible and affordable to the poorest in the developing world soon to replace any electricity that could other­wise be generated by burning coal, oil, or gas. Thus, a primary focus of the developed world should be strategies designed to put the alternative energy into the hands of the poor, not only the acquisition of alternative energy ourselves,

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so that investment in the developing world is not wasted on infrastructure for fossil fuels, like coal-­burning or gas-­burning electricity-­generating plants, that would lock in fossil-­fuel use for additional years and would in any case have to be replaced sooner rather than ­later. With prompt assistance, poorer countries can leapfrog over the carbon infrastructure that wealthier countries are already stuck with. Replacing our own polluting infrastructure ­will be more expensive and ­will take longer, although we should certainly avoid adding any more, such as the many proposed new pipelines for e­ ither oil or gas that are misguided diversions of capital investment. Gas is not, contrary to corporate greenwash, a “bridge away” from fossil fuel; it is a fossil fuel.27 If the public subsidies come off all the fossil fuels, including gas and its pipelines, and are instead put on alternative energy for a transition period, ­there is no reason why noncarbon energy that does not undermine the climate cannot continue to become increasingly competitive in price with damaging and now grossly underpriced fossil fuels. Indeed, the prices of, for example, solar and wind have plummeted in recent years and are already in most places competitive in price with fossil fuels even with the latter’s misguided public subsidies.28 Analyses by the rigorous Carbon Tracker Initiative show that new investments in renewables are now cheaper than new investments in coal in all major markets (even Australia, with all its coal), and over half of coal plants operating ­today cost more to run than building new renewables now does.29 Not only w ­ ill sufficiently affordable alternative energy help to overcome “energy poverty” in the developing world and head off increases in emissions t­ here, but it can directly assist in eliminating current carbon emissions by making replacements for fossil fuel readily available in the developed world. In the affluent world, much of our energy is literally wasted or consumed by unnecessary ser­vices and products, and by simply reducing waste and indulgence, we can fairly easily use less carbon energy without replacing it with anything.30 But where ­people, including ­those who do not appreciate the seriousness of the dangers from climate

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changes, are unwilling or unable to reduce energy usage, they can have a price-­competitive replacement for fossil fuels. In sum, in order to stay within the cumulative carbon bud­get for the planet as a w ­ hole, carbon emissions need both to come down sharply in the developed world but also not go up very much in the developing world, while development nevertheless accelerates sustainably. At both ends of the line, accessible and affordable noncarbon energy is crucial. For once at least, the same response, alternative energy, can serve (some of ) the desires of the rich and all the needs of the poor. But smart targeted initiatives are needed to make it accessible to the poor quickly enough—­prompt affordability for the poor is not a challenge that unaided market mechanisms can possibly meet.31 I have tried, then, to be reasonably concrete (for a theorist) about what needs to be done, although I have not tried to say which specific forms of alternative energy should be encouraged or exactly how, since t­ hese do not need to be top-­down decisions.32 However, it may be useful to illustrate a concrete possibility. India is in fact proposing a highly ambitious initiative, “One Sun One World One Grid,” aimed at ultimately creating a single planetary electricity grid, using subsea High-­Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) cabling for the connections between countries. Grid connectivity would leverage the time differences between countries to manage the intermittency of low-­cost solar-­and wind-­power generation: “a 1,000 km subsea HVDC connection from Oman to Gujarat would take ultra-­low cost solar electricity . . . ​in the ­middle of the Oman and UAE after­noon and deliver it into the eve­ning peak in Dhaka.”33 During Mumbai’s night, the sun may be shining in Bhutan and the wind blowing in Nepal. Such a grid would obviously require extensive international cooperation, and at its maximum, it would literally and physically connect much of humanity across national bound­aries. As the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analy­sis in Cleveland observes, “Virtually unlimited low-­cost renewables are available ­today at massive scale in India, with zero inflation indexation for 25 years. This is

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entirely sustainable power producing no carbon emissions and no air or ­water pollution. Deflationary green exports can realistically entirely replace expensive, inflationary, polluting fossil-­fuel imports, with vision and international co-­operation.”34 We need to move t­ oward a systematic look at the vari­ous intersecting responsibilities. Why should rich countries cooperate with such proj­ects (not necessarily precisely this one)? Why do we in the rich countries share in the responsibility for the dissemination of alternative energy within and among developing countries? How did this become a task that partly falls to us? I ­will brush over familiar reasons that have nothing to do with climate change. For example, if ­every h ­ uman being is to have a meaningful basic right to subsistence, then all circumstances require an international division of moral ­labor sufficient to see that ­those who are now unable to provide for their own subsistence are enabled to become capable of providing for themselves, which ­will involve in many cases the external provision of resources not now available locally and therefore dependent on the rest of us.35 But some less familiar, but impor­tant and in­ter­est­ing, reasons specifically concern climate change. The Indian government is entitled to give high priority to reducing poverty in India. India, which arguably is of all the countries in the world the most threatened by climate change, w ­ ill cut its own throat, however, if it injects large additional amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere and contributes to humanity’s exceeding the cumulative carbon bud­get for some “nondisastrous” amount of temperature rise, not to mention creating dangerous amounts of ground-­level coal pollution that ­will continue to multiply cases of lung and heart disease within Indian cities. It is vital, however, to remember that additional Indian carbon emissions ­will be such a dangerous prob­lem for the planet only ­because of past and pre­sent emissions from developed nations and more recently from the continuing and sharply worsening surge of overwhelmingly coal-­driven development by China.36 The cumulative green­house gas emissions of the United States,

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­ reat Britain, and China each considerably exceed the cumulative G emissions of India at this point.37 India’s contribution to the fact that humanity as a ­whole may soon exceed the global cumulative carbon bud­get has so far been relatively minor—­far less than the contribution of the United States or the Eu­ro­pean Union, and per capita, only a fraction. But like China a ­couple of de­cades ago, India is on the threshold of rapid, massive increases in energy consumption. What energy sources ­will it choose? Now, as Indian and Chinese leaders argue—­and indeed I have argued for twenty-­five years—it would be wildly unjust for us in the rich countries to say, “Sorry, but our own development and our own continuing enjoyment of affluence have used up most of the cumulative carbon bud­get so t­ here is no room within the bud­get for the emissions that your escape from poverty would generate, so you ­will unfortunately simply have to remain poor.”38 (And no one would listen to us, in any case.) On the other hand, the cumulative carbon bud­get for a par­tic­u­lar temperature rise is not an artifact that can be modified by choice. The cumulative carbon bud­gets for vari­ous degrees of climate change are unrelenting features of the dynamics of the climate of this planet. If we exceed the cumulative carbon bud­get for a reasonable probability of a given temperature rise, the a­ ctual temperature rise ­will prob­ably be larger, and the concomitant climate change ­will be more dangerous. Th ­ ere is no overdraft privilege for the planetary carbon bud­gets, however much we might wish t­ here w ­ ere.39 It is conceivable that the scientists have miscalculated them—­specifically, overestimated our allowance40—­but the politicians cannot fudge them.41 It would be profoundly unjust if India—­and Africa, much of whose development is still to come—­could not develop ­because the carbon emissions bud­get is about to be used up by the already affluent. Nevertheless, development produced at the price of exceeding the emissions bud­get would simply not be sustainable— it would in fact undermine itself. This was the global dilemma of the twenty-­first ­century before the prices of renewable energy fell so rapidly and imaginative solutions, including massive batteries

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and innovative electricity grids using AI, w ­ ere found for the intermittency in any one place of wind and sun. Therefore, development ­ought to proceed, but proceed sustainably, which can only mean with sharply declining carbon emissions, not rising carbon emissions, as in the planet-­destructive case of China’s per­sis­tence in building coal-­burning, electricity-­generating plants both in China and abroad (through the B ­ elt and Road Initiative).42 The only good alternative is a rapid scaling up of noncarbon energy within, and perhaps among, developing countries—­not necessarily as ambitious as “One Sun One World One Grid”43—­plus mea­sures to liberate ­women, like education, jobs, and access to affordable contraception, that w ­ ill slow population growth.44 ­These are daunting challenges po­liti­cally and technologically, but responsibilities to see that something like this happens are shared by the developed countries, then, for at least three conceptually separable reasons. The first of ­these reasons is grounded in causal responsibility for climate change itself. Thus, it is grounded squarely in the national historical responsibility analyzed in chapter 2. However, nations also have responsibilities of international justice with bases other than the damage done by their own past be­hav­ior. The second reason depends on forward-­looking negative responsibility to avoid, in our effort to deal with climate change, causing damage by a policy of making fossil fuels more expensive and scarcer within our dominant energy regime without providing adequate alternatives to fossil fuel. The third rests on another closely related negative responsibility not to exploit the vulnerability of the poor and weak, which is generally in­de­pen­dent of historical responsibility. This duty is especially stringent, however, to the extent that one has contributed to creating the vulnerability exploited, which depends on the extent of one’s historical responsibility. To create vulnerability and then exploit it is “compound injustice.”45 We look at each of ­these three reasons in turn. First, we have seen that India’s potentially looming emissions would only be so dangerous ­because our emissions preceded

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theirs. The Indian—or ­later, African—­trunk well might break the camel’s back, but only ­because the camel is already carry­ing the American, Eu­ro­pean, and Chinese trunks, as we saw in chapter 2. As also explained ­there, it is essential to distinguish the purely physical from the economic determinants. Physically, on the one hand, additional emissions anywhere on the planet raise the general probability of worse weather in vari­ous other­wise physically distant places—­the retention by green­house gases of more heat energy on the planet than in the previous millennia of h ­ uman existence drives volatile weather. The Indian monsoon, for example, has recently been departing from its previous patterns in ways that are desperately threatening to the supply of drinking w ­ ater in India.46 Eco­nom­ically and po­liti­cally, on the other hand, it is our choice ­whether we continue to practice the sovereign externalization analyzed in the wrongful imposition arguments in chapter 2, as well as the ­simple unfairness analyzed in the pure fairness argument, by asserting that all costs for mitigation, adaptation, and loss resulting from climate change in India must be borne by India. We could persist in the “fateful and contentious assumption” that “what­ ever prob­lems arise within one nation’s territory are its own, in some sense that entails that it can and o ­ ught to deal with them on its own, with (only) its own resources.”47 This is, however, an outrageous assumption given what we know about our own centuries-­long causal contribution to the buildup of CO2 under­ lying ­those prob­lems—­this would be handwashing squarely in the ignoble tradition of Pontius Pilate.48 Second, it could be our decision to discourage carbon emissions by taking mea­sures to raise the price of carbon that would risk pricing poor Indians out of the market for what might remain for some of them their only affordable source of energy, if we si­mul­ ta­neously allow initiatives like “One Sun One World One Grid” to fail for lack of international support. As alternative energy continues to gain a greater price advantage and to become increasingly plentiful, mea­sures that raise fossil-­fuel prices should negatively

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affect progressively fewer ­people.49 Support for alternative energy can, then, reduce the damage done during the transition between energy regimes. Meanwhile, both t­ hese actions of ours—­our large contribution to the prob­lem and our choice of a market-­based solution, if that is what we choose—­could deepen India’s plight and make our actions partly causally responsible for the resultant harm. A principal reason why financial support for India’s transition to alternative energy is not a “foreign aid program” is, then, that at bottom it constitutes taking action in order to refrain from severely harming, not positively helping—­from additional severe harming, if one accepts the wrongful imposition arguments. Replacing carbon-­based energy with alternative energy promptly—­even preemptively—­can avoid the harm of energy deprivation during the unavoidable energy transition. This support is necessary in order to create an escape route for them from the corner we ­will have forced them into by our emissions, including the many unnecessary ones that continue unabated ­today. This second reason we bear moral responsibility rests, in turn, on a rock-­bottom princi­ple: avoid depriving ­people of necessities without which they are helpless (however good your ultimate goal—­even limiting climate change).50 The necessity in this case is adequate energy that it is not self-­defeating to use. Once we w ­ ere unknowingly contributing to the deprivation produced by climate change. Next, we could be contributing to the deprivation produced by solutions to climate change. We o ­ ught to provide protection against further f­ uture deprivation as well as grant support in tackling the pre­sent deprivation that we already helped to create. Thirdly, and very closely related, if we allow the world’s poorest to bear the brunt of the transition out of carbon energy and into alternative energy, we are, in the common phrase, balancing the energy transition on the backs of the poor. We would in effect be producing an upward re­distribution of wealth from the poor to the rich by making ­those who are already among the worst-­off members of humanity suffer the costs of the global transition between

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unsafe and safe energy regimes rather than allocating some of our own wealth to invest in lightening their burdens, thus keeping all the benefits of the old energy regime for ourselves while dumping the pain of the transition to a new energy regime on them. This is compound injustice ­because a costly energy transition is required in order to escape the global energy regime that we early industrializing nations created. Leaving the poorer nations to pay for their own transition out of our carbon energy regime would clearly be compound injustice ­because it would make the worst-­off worse off still than they are, as well as far worse off than we are, as a result of their being left to wrestle on their own with a solution for a climate prob­lem they did not create, but we did. Raising the price and reducing the supply of fossil fuel would likely reduce carbon emissions in India, which in itself is a good ­thing. But in isolation, ­these mea­sures could deprive some poor Indians—­and Africans, and ­others—of any source of energy they could afford, and thereby effectively deprive them of energy. We would be reducing our damage to the climate by trapping the world’s poorest in misery that they lack the means to escape.51 As the agency Practical Action observes, “A life without access to energy is a life of drudgery.”52 This upward re­distribution resulting from responses to climate change relying on the demand-­side market mechanism of higher prices for fossil fuels or the supply-­side mechanism of restrictions on the extraction of fossil fuels would be in addition to the upward re­distribution already resulting from our contribution to the creation of the prob­lem of climate change itself, which ­will force India to incur enormous expenses in dealing with, for example, sea-­level rise and storm surges along its vast coasts and disruptions to the monsoon in its interior. The rich got energy and became richer; the poor ­will get sea-­level rise and become poorer, if we treat them as no concern of ours and thereby deepen global in­equality. We have now seen reasons of justice why we have the responsibility to perform three specific tasks: we should not use so much more fossil fuel ourselves that our emissions do not leave enough

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of any of the remaining cumulative carbon bud­get to allow some of the poorest to rely unavoidably for a ­little longer on inexpensive fossil fuel, while they lack access to any other energy; we should see to it that in the course of preventing the cumulative carbon bud­get from being exceeded, the poorest are not priced entirely out of the energy market; and we ­ought not to orchestrate an unjust transition that creates benefits for the richest but costs for the poorest. Failure at ­either of the first two tasks deprives the poor of necessities; and failure at the third unjustly exploits their vulnerability and exacerbates in­equality—it inflicts compound injustice. And we have seen that an alternative policy is readily available: we can contribute substantially to making alternative energy accessible and affordable for t­ oday’s poorest through supporting initiatives that provide them, for instance, electricity from renewable energy (irrespective of ­whether that becomes part of an ambitious global grid). We must keep “the poor of the ­future in mind, but also ­today’s poor, whose life on this earth is brief and who cannot keep on waiting.”53 ­Future “Strangers” and Tipping Points

Pope Francis is correct that we should not deceive ourselves into thinking that we must choose between ­today’s poor and tomorrow’s poor. The poorest in the ­future ­will be even more vulnerable to us than the poorest living ­today, ­because our relationship with ­future generations is totally asymmetrical. We control the kind of world in which they w ­ ill have to begin to shape their lives, but they have no way to influence our decisions about the world we leave them—­indeed, even which individuals ­will be born may be determined by us. In this context, the p ­ eople of the ­future, whoever the individuals turn out to be, need at least two complementary ­things from us. First, they need entrenched sustainable development now so that the poorest of the f­ uture can have the resources for better lives than their ancestors, t­ oday’s poorest. This is another power­ful

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reason why we must urgently get alternative energy into the hands of ­today’s poor rather than allowing them in desperation to use more fossil fuel and undercut their own long-­term development by injecting more CO2 into the atmosphere. The best way to improve the lives of tomorrow’s poor may be to improve the lives of ­today’s poor, who w ­ ill bring tomorrow’s poor into the world and provide them with what nutrition and education they ­will get—­further reason not to think one should or could choose between the current poor and the ­future poor. Second, the ­future poor need for us to bring climate change ­under control and to fix as firm a ceiling as we can on the disruptions that climate change w ­ ill bring them, especially in order to prevent disasters that it ­will be too late for them to prevent and possibly too late for them to adapt to.54 The necessity for us to act now if they are to be spared extreme climate change l­ater is the basis for the extreme urgency of immediate action. In chapter 1, we noted three reasons why t­ hose alive now can reasonably be expected to make an exceptionally robust effort on climate change: (1) ­future generations ­will very likely face burdens and dangers greater than ours, (2) the worsening dangers are currently unlimited, and (3) less effort by us may well allow climate change to pass critical tipping points. In sum, the burdens and dangers for f­ uture generations w ­ ill prob­ably be worse and are now worsening, are still without limit, and are potentially unbearable. We also saw that historical context m ­ atters in that, in general, some tasks are not deferrable to another time or transferable to another generation.55 ­These tasks must be done now, or they can never be done, ­because the win­dow of opportunity to do them ­will have closed. Obviously, responsibilities to respond to the third kind of consideration, the danger of passage beyond tipping points, are utterly nondeferrable. And the failure to set a limit entails a failure to prevent the passing of further tipping points. It may be worth probing ­these grounds of responsibility a bit more, even fi­nally in some quite tentative ways.

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The Date-­of-­Last-­Opportunity to Prevent Disaster

The critical time to consider, then, is not the date at which a disastrous event w ­ ill begin to occur, which may not be ­until some considerably ­later time in the f­ uture, de­cades or centuries ahead. The critical point is what we can call “the date-­of-­last-­opportunity,” that is, the last time at which it is—or, was, if the opportunity has already been missed—­still pos­si­ble to prevent the disastrous effect in question. The tipping point may lie de­cades or centuries prior to the emergence of the disaster b ­ ecause of the long time lags in the climate system between lock in and occurrence. Some scientists have recently put the point in terms of the relation between what they call “intervention time,” which is the amount of time left during which an intervention could still occur (or the amount of time left before an outcome becomes physically locked in), and “reaction time,” which is the amount of time it would take ­humans to carry out the relevant intervention. Their point is that “if reaction time is longer than the intervention time left . . . ​we have lost control.” They illustrate the point by assuming that ­there is at least one major tipping point in the earth’s climate system that ­will be passed ­unless net carbon emissions reach zero and that the tipping point itself ­will be passed in much less than thirty years: “the intervention time left to prevent tipping could already have shrunk ­towards zero, whereas the reaction time to achieve net zero emissions is 30 years at best.”56 What I w ­ ill continue to call “the date-­of-­last-­opportunity” is, in the terminology of ­these scientists, the date at which the reaction time exceeds the intervention time, making the intervention impossible to carry out. For some effects, the date-­of-­last-­opportunity may be soon or even now, and sadly for some disasters, the date is already past. This is starkly and tragically embodied in the melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), mentioned in chapter 1. When I began to work on climate change in the early 1990s, the debates had already begun about what should be the target of mitigation efforts; and a rise in average global temperature of not more

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than 2°C, or 1.5°C, beyond the pre–­Industrial Revolution average temperature had not yet been po­liti­cally anointed as the official goal. In ­those days, many activists said roughly, “What­ever the target becomes exactly, we must at least be sure not to pass any catastrophic thresholds, like the threshold for the melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.” But, sure enough, in 2014 two dif­f er­ent teams of scientists converged on the conclusion that this melting is now irreversible—­this date-­of-­last-­opportunity, the last chance to prevent this effect from becoming irreversible, has receded into history as a tragic lost opportunity.57 The kilometers-­deep WAIS—­vast mountains of frozen ­water—is already melting and ­will continue to melt, and from this additional w ­ ater alone ocean levels ­will ultimately rise around four or five meters above their current level. The pro­cess of melting ­will most likely take two or three centuries, but we have no good reason to doubt that it ­will definitely happen. This w ­ ill in itself be catastrophic for hundreds of millions of ­people who live in coastal cities and ­will be forced to abandon their homes. It ­will be at best deeply burdensome eco­nom­ically for their fellow citizens, who ­will bear the tax burden from the forced relocations and, in many cases, the influx into their communities of additional ­people who w ­ ill need shelter and medical care and whose c­ hildren w ­ ill also need education, as well as the costs of building entire new cities as large as, say, New Orleans, Norfolk, Boston, Kolkata, Mumbai, and Shanghai, all of which ­will prob­ably be substantially inundated within around 250 years, along with much of Bangladesh, Vietnam (the Mekong Delta ­will go ­under ­water early on), and numerous small island nations. Other catastrophic thresholds, known and unknown, certain and uncertain, may loom in the mists of the not very distant ­future. As one epigraph indicates, leading authority Tom Lovejoy believes that the point of no return for the Amazon rainforest is near.58 Direct empirical mea­sure­ments suggest that we may be approaching the threshold for disruption of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).59 Disruption of the AMOC

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would interrupt the Eu­ro­pean warming from the “Gulf Stream” and allow, among other t­ hings, countries in Eu­rope to cool t­ oward the temperature other­w ise to be expected from their latitude. Vari­ous thresholds for the massive release of methane ­either from permafrost on land—­releases are already occurring in Alaska and elsewhere in the Arctic60—or from ocean depths61 are somewhere nearby in time, ­future or past. The direct effects of the methane would be brief compared to the effects of CO2, but even a brief surge of methane could, for instance, drive average global temperature past the thresholds for the melting of major additional bodies of ice, such as, most notably, Greenland’s ice sheet (larger than WAIS), which would produce further extremely long-­term, but large, sea-­level rise on top of that caused by the now-­inevitable addition to the oceans of the ­water to be melted from the West Antarctic ice.62 The fact that w ­ hether profoundly impor­tant events—­some­ times disastrous events—­will occur centuries into the ­future ­will be determined by the choices made by the pre­sent generation is the result of a fundamental structural feature of time that undergirds the asymmetrical relationship between pre­sent generations and generations in the far ­future. This asymmetrical relationship explains further why the ele­ments of our inherited phenomenology of agency that Scheffler describes as “the primacy of near effects over remote effects” and “the primacy of individual effects over group effects” are now profoundly misleading.63 Let us explore in a l­ittle more depth this last of the three reasons we saw in chapter 1 why action ­ought to be taken right now to limit destructive climate change: the historical contingency that we are in fact the last p ­ eople with the opportunity to rein in the social practices of fossil-­fuel combustion that are forcing the climate ­toward tipping points with possibly unbearable consequences. Our being the pivotal generation lies at the peak of a crescendo of reasons for our exceptional responsibility. First, even when a threatening disaster is in no way one’s own causal responsibility, if the disaster can be prevented at relatively

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modest cost, and the disaster is extreme, one o ­ ught to act to prevent it. This is the fundamental reasoning illustrated by the parable of the Good Samaritan.64 The Samaritan is in no way causally responsible for the man’s being in the ditch. But the man cannot get out of the ditch without help, and help is easy for any passerby to give. One need not be committed to any kind of maximizing requirement whatsoever, like a requirement that one should always perform the best available act in ­every situation, in order to believe simply that if on some par­tic­u­lar occasions someone needs to be rescued from a bad situation, and one can do so with relatively ­little effort and cost, one ­ought to do it. Apart from any religious authority, this seems to be an ele­ment of common sense, although it is difficult to put one’s fin­ger on exactly why it seems so obvious. I suspect that the common-­sense rationale is something like a fundamental sense of proportion against a background assumption of h ­ uman equality: it seems absurd that one should allow such a serious threat for someone ­else to persist when it would involve so l­ ittle trou­ble for oneself to deal with it—­refusal to act smacks of taking oneself ridiculously seriously by assigning so much significance to avoiding so ­little difficulty for oneself rather than relieving so much difficulty for another person. The challenges in making the transition from a carbon-­burning energy regime to alternative sources of energy are on the ­whole relatively minor compared to the gargantuan consequences of persisting in the carbon energy-­ business-­as-­usual. For instance, t­ hose who would other­wise suffer unemployment–­—­like coal miners, frackers, and their families—­ could be protected by arrangements for a just transition with fair burden-­sharing. Second, however, the climate change case is obviously in fact not a case like the Good Samaritan’s in which a threatening disaster is in no way one’s own causal responsibility, if one belongs to a nation with high cumulative carbon emissions that are continuing. This is one point at which the arguments about intergenerational justice cannot be entirely separated from the arguments about

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international justice. One’s responsibility to deal with intergenerational climate threats is affected by one’s general responsibility for the occurrence of climate change, and such causal or historical responsibility varies extensively across nations, very roughly according to the extent of their industrialization, as we saw in chapter 2. If one’s nation has been contributing substantially to climate change and is at pre­sent still contributing, then one’s nation’s responsibility to contribute to the prevention of disasters like the melting of the Greenland ice sheets and the destabilization of the Amazon Forest by reducing emissions is a negative responsibility to cease undermining the climate system and to stop creating threats for members of f­ uture generations of all nations, not a positive responsibility to rescue ­future generations from a threat not of one’s own making analogous to the Good Samaritan’s. In general, most p ­ eople think that such negative responsibility deserves high priority, and that where one is actively contributing to damage and misery, one’s duty is to stop it, even if stopping it involves considerable costs to oneself. One has no right to persist in creating threats to the lives and welfare of ­others, whoever they turn out to be. This consideration makes it reasonable that any one set of generations in a nation that has contributed substantially to climate change and is continuing to do so should bear a considerable burden, if necessary, to stop making ­matters worse. “Stopping” would involve immediately sharply reducing carbon emissions, which seems to have been precisely what would have been needed to prevent the now-­inexorable melting of the WAIS. Third, it seems inherently impor­tant that we are the ones with the last chance to avoid placing the seal of finality on the severity of the potential losses—we are ­those alive at the date-­of-­last-­ opportunity to prevent climate disasters.65 We have just seen that in responding to a date-­of-­last-­opportunity, the ­people in a nation with strong obligations to stop exacerbating climate change might be d ­ oing no more than, or only a ­little more than, they ­ought for the first two reasons to have been ­doing already in any case. Next, consider further ­whether beyond other such prior grounds for

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action and beyond the sheer magnitude of the potential catastrophe in, say, numbers of rights thwarted and numbers of lives blighted in the f­ uture from inaction now, it is additionally significant ­whether the potential agents are the ones alive at the date-­of-­ last-­opportunity. This situation would be as if the Samaritan not only had thrown the man into the ditch, but also somehow knew that he would be the last to pass that way before nightfall and that the stranger in the ditch could not make it through the night if not rescued now by him. It was now or never, and therefore it was he or no one to the rescue. Put differently, “The current generation is drinking in the last-­chance saloon of climate change mitigation, and closing time is near.”66 If in, say, 1992, leaders had realized that the generation then alive could still prevent the melting of the WAIS (if they could have), but that they ­were the very last ones, they not only should have expended a portion of effort and expense that might have seemed to be the “typical,” or “fair,” share of any “similar” generation, but they should have taken up a heavier burden precisely ­because they ­were the last to have the opportunity to prevent such a catastrophe for hundreds of millions of coastal dwellers.67 In an impor­tant ­battle, one should do one’s fair share ­every day, but if one could somehow know that the decisive day had arrived, and the outcome would be de­cided on this day, any ordinary person would think, I believe, that one should give even more on this day just ­because it was the last chance to win. Why? It is difficult to grasp any further reason, and perhaps any ­will be “one thought too many.”68 We may be at argumentative rock-­bottom and have already specified the best reason: this is the last chance to avoid irretrievable loss. Further Reasons? Past Sacrifice, Hope, and Continuity

But a first additional thought, among three, is that in a way the ultimate value of the sacrifices every­one ­else has already made on ­every other previous day depends on ­whether the sacrifices

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we make on this decisive day are adequate for success. If ours are adequate, all the sacrifices on all the other days ­will have led to victory; if not, the past sacrifices w ­ ill have led nowhere. At this point in time, every­thing depends on the effort made on this climactic day by us. To some degree, at least, the pre­sent controls the past’s value. Th ­ ose of us fortunate enough to be living strongly influence not only where the ­future begins but also where the past ends. What we make of the pre­sent ­will deeply affect both. Perhaps out of solidarity one bears some responsibility to the good ­people of the past as well as to the p ­ eople of the ­future to preserve what decent h ­ umans—­past and pre­sent—­have valued and have sacrificed to preserve. Which past sacrifices?69 I have been emphasizing the almost-­ total failure of most socie­ties so far to rise to the challenge of climate change, and past sacrifices specifically for the sake of controlling climate change have been so meager that they do not seem to merit much consideration. But climate change threatens many of our most valuable institutions and practices—­those constituting eco­nom­ically adequate, reasonably humane, culturally rich, and technologically advanced socie­ties in the building of which some of our pre­de­ces­sors did indeed sacrifice and strug­gle. It is the sacrifices made in the creation of decent socie­ties in which p ­ eople can re­spect each other, cooperate willingly, and accept differences that it would be tragic to have come to an end ­because, for example, multiple mass migrations necessitated by climate-­driven sea-­level rise undermined minimal civility and sustained ­bitter conflict. Suppose a boxer whose c­ areer was made pos­si­ble by the sacrifices of ­others is engaged in a fifteen-­round fight, and has won seven rounds and lost seven. Now every­thing depends on who wins the pivotal fifteenth round. It seems reasonable for the boxer to give it all he has got to give in this final round. And the generations alive at the date-­of-­last-­opportunity to prevent a disaster seem to me to be analogously bound to make a maximum effort. One could think of them as unfortunate to be alive at this time and to have to do so much, or one can think of them as fortunate to

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live now and to be the ones who have the opportunity to accomplish so much for untold generations—to be the ones who make the difference. Is t­ here some fallacy or illusion h ­ ere? Initially this reasoning seems disturbingly similar to the reasoning that makes it so difficult to withdraw from a losing war. If a society has been fighting a long but unsuccessful war, the society has what economists call substantial “sunk costs”—­substantial investments have already been made and cannot be recovered. And one may think, if we withdraw from the conflict now, it ­will all have been for naught, but if by fighting a ­little longer, we can turn it around and win, it ­will all have been worthwhile. And ­because of such reasoning, pointless wars drag on and on, in the vain hope that per­sis­tence ­will turn the tide. But the usual m ­ istake is automatically to assume that simply fighting longer w ­ ill in fact lead to winning. When one has been losing all along, ­will something automatically change? The prob­lem is commonly this false premise, but not a fallacious inference. It is indeed sometimes the case that, if by fighting a l­ittle longer, one can turn it around and win, it ­will all have been worthwhile. The question is w ­ hether the if-­condition ­will turn out to be true. The fighter who thinks, “I have taken a considerable beating so far, but I have won half the rounds, and if I win the last round, I ­will break the tie and win the fight,” is not engaged in fallacious reasoning. He simply needs to make his premise true. He needs to be as sure as he can that he wins the last round. Maximum effort could indeed pay off. It seems similarly reasonable to expect the generations alive at the date-­of-­last-­opportunity to prevent a disaster to do all they can, lest all previous efforts come to nothing, provided only that the further effort is not reliably known to be futile. If one misses a genuine last opportunity to prevent a loss, the resultant regressive change becomes irreversible, and what is lost is irretrievable. I do not know any deeper reason why an irretrievable loss of a disastrous magnitude is vital to avoid, but one can

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add two further brief supportive conjectures, one about hope and one about continuity in valuing. Before a change for the worse becomes irreversible, t­ here is hope that it can be avoided, and the hope itself can be precious. Irreversibility brings the death of hope. The loss of hope represents, as Jonathan Schell wrote of extinction, a kind of second death: beyond the deaths of all the individuals, the death of the possibility of any more such individuals: “death cuts off life; extinction cuts off birth.”70 In the case of the WAIS, we have lost a major b ­ attle (before we had even begun to fight). We have lost any hope of avoiding a major rise in sea-­level up ­every coast onto ­every ­continent and into scores of metropolises and countless villages, making hundreds of millions of lives miserable and perhaps desperate. This failure is deeply discouraging, and one t­ hing that humanity cannot do without in the strug­gle to limit climate change is hope. We cannot succeed in preventing additional disasters ­unless we can lick our wounds and then return to the fight with refreshed hope and steeled determination to succeed. Rationally, of course, the frustration of one specific hope, even a major one, is no reason to abandon other separate hopes. And ­there are many more ­battles that we can win. But each lost ­battle is still a blow, and hope in itself is of value and to be preserved u ­ nless definitely ill-­founded. Sometimes flagging hope can be revived by winning a new round with a final effort—­another reason to try ­until the last. ­Those of us who de­cades ago understood, or should have understood, the state of the planet have already failed to prevent substantial climate change. The climate is changing now, and ­will change more rapidly through many tomorrows. ­These changes ­will be especially difficult to adapt to for ­those to come who possess the fewest resources. But ahead lie many more impor­tant ­battles that can be won if enough ­people do not give up the fight. The outcomes of f­ uture strug­gles ­will determine crucially how much more severe and dangerous climate change becomes. One ­ought to keep hope alive for t­ hose generations of “strangers” who must

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make a life in the world we ­will have ­shaped, and one ­ought to prevent as much irreversible decline in the livability of the planet as pos­si­ble so that they can enjoy lives of dignity, not drudgery. Second, the preceding arguments appeal primarily to the humanity and potential dignity of ­those to come and imply that one o ­ ught to bequeath, at a very minimum, living conditions in which dignity is practically pos­si­ble. Writing more recently about death, Samuel Scheffler has made the provocative suggestion that “the world of the ­future becomes, as it ­were, more like a party one had to leave early and less like a gathering of strangers” if one appreciates that “many of the ­things in our own lives that now ­matter to us would cease to do so or would come to ­matter less” if one ­were not confident that one ­will be succeeded by ­others who can and w ­ ill value what we value.71 This resonates with Hannah Arendt’s reflection on the other of the two greatest threats to humanity besides climate change, nuclear weapons: “man can be courageous only as long as he knows he is survived by ­those who are like him, that he fulfills a role in something more permanent than himself, ‘the enduring chronicle of mankind,’ as Faulkner once put it.”72 If e­ ither Scheffler’s thesis about the dependence of our valuing upon subsequent valuing by o ­ thers or Arendt’s thesis about the dependence of courage on a confidence in survival is correct, it provides an at least partly, but by no means entirely, self-­interested additional reason why we would be wise to leave a planet on which ­human life ­will not become nasty, brutish, and short, but w ­ ill be lived in circumstances in which ­those who arrive at the party ­after we have departed w ­ ill have the leisure and capacity to value and preserve much (at least) of what we value and try to preserve. This means at an absolute minimum that we must not allow conditions to deteriorate so far that the strug­gle for mere survival becomes all-­consuming for even more p ­ eople than it is t­ oday. This commitment in turn requires that we stringently limit severe negative changes that would be irreversible. We must not rest for as long as climate change remains unlimited and additional tipping points

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lie ahead. This is a further reason to act and to act even more energetically.73 Conclusion

What ­matters most, however, about a date-­of-­last-­opportunity may be simply that inaction at such a time leads to irretrievable loss. Of course, in many cases no one can be sure that a par­tic­u­ lar date is a date-­of-­last-­opportunity ­until long ­after the date has receded into the past. In order to have any effect, we must choose now—­under uncertainty. This kind of uncertainty, however, tilts strongly t­ oward action.74 ­Either this is the date-­of-­last-­opportunity for one or more disasters, or it is not. Suppose it is not, but we choose to act in worthwhile ways like rapidly reducing carbon emissions. Then we w ­ ill exert ourselves and incur expenses beyond our responsibilities ­toward ­people of the ­future. We w ­ ill not help to save f­ uture generations from catastrophe but only to enrich the conditions of their lives to a degree that we have no duty to bring about. We w ­ ill have morally “overachieved.” But if the tasks we undertake are clearly not excessively burdensome for us, at worst we ­will have left a legacy for f­ uture generations that exceeds our responsibilities.75 If moral overachievement is a “­mistake,” it seems like a good kind of ­mistake to make—­and it seems a bit strange to think it is a ­mistake. Or suppose it is. If in fact we are at a date-­of-­last-­opportunity for one or more climate disasters, and we choose not to act, we ­will have allowed an avoidable disaster to engulf ­those who come ­after us. We w ­ ill have done nothing while an irretrievable opportunity dis­appears. A disaster that we could have locked out w ­ ill have become locked in to the climate system. If we miss the last opportunity, it is lost—­forever. An uncertainty between w ­ hether to risk putting in more worthwhile effort than we might have been required to—to overachieve—or to risk leaving the door open to a catastrophe that ­will reverberate through generations helpless to stop it—to fail

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to rescue untold millions from terrible fates—is not a reason for delay but a reason for action. Few “­gambles” are so bearable on the downside and so promising on the upside, which is a spectacular opportunity—­perhaps the last—to make an event that would be intolerably bad for whoever experiences it far less likely, if not impossible.

4 Are ­There Second Chances on Climate Change? The six stages of climate denial are: It’s not real. It’s not us. It’s not that bad. It’s too expensive to fix. Aha, ­here’s a ­great solution (that actually does nothing). And—oh no! Now it’s too late. You ­really should have warned us ­earlier.1 ­ on’t think of it as the warmest month of August in D California in the last ­century, think of it as one of the coolest months of August in California in the next ­century.2 And ­because I cannot apologize to the tree, to my own self I say, I am sorry. I am sorry I have been so reckless with your life.3 Fix It ­Later?

Perhaps ­today is, however, not in fact the date-­of-­last-­opportunity. Even if what we fail to do ­today profoundly affects what happens in ­future, maybe what is done in ­future can nevertheless reverse the effects of our inaction t­ oday. First, to what extent can h ­ umans l­ ater undo the damage that we are ­doing now by our grossly inadequate 89

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response to climate change? And, second, how should any possibilities of ­later recovery or repairs influence our judgments in the pre­sent about the stringency and urgency of action called for by the rapidly worsening climate? My fundamental answer to the second question is that the stringency and urgency of action now ­ought to remain unaffected by any hopes and dreams of a ­later “fix.” The answer to the first question and the relation of this answer to the answer to the second are complex, if fascinating, challenges—­more complex than I realized when I first began to write about them. My first attempt to answer t­ hese two questions directly was the controversial article “Climate Dreaming.”4 I believe that my basic caution in that 2017 piece against relaxing in the pre­sent in hope that ­people in the ­future can repair the damage we do now was well justified, even better justified than I knew then. The issues, however, are also more complicated than I understood then and require a more sophisticated treatment that I w ­ ill attempt to provide h ­ ere. In the interim, I have benefited especially from early and empirically well-­informed philosophical critiques of my arguments by Dominic Lenzi5 and from subsequent comprehensive overviews of the empirical lit­er­a­ture.6 Before tackling specific issues, we might remind ourselves of our own historical setting. In 1992, many eminent national politicians from around the world, among them an impressive collection of heads of state including US President George H. W. Bush, gathered dramatically in Rio to adopt the Framework Convention on Climate Change and to promise effective steps to limit climate change. ­Those promises have been broken. Few steps of any significance have followed, and a crucial quarter of a c­ entury and more in which climate change could have been ­limited to a much lower level than it ­will now reach has been wasted while our supposed leaders have failed to lead on—or even pay attention to—­the most impor­tant threat facing civilization.7 It is ­little won­der that the generation of Greta Thunberg is angry that opportunities that could easily have been taken de­cades before their births ­were repeatedly frittered away

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while the fossil-­fuel regime entrenched and expanded business-­ as-­usual, and the rate of carbon emissions continued to accelerate. This quarter of a ­century of po­liti­cal failure and corporate deceit and greed m ­ atters most fundamentally, as we have already seen, ­because of the cumulative carbon bud­get. A virtually linear relationship holds between the average global temperature of the earth and the total atmospheric accumulation of CO2 since the date at which the combustion of carbon-­based sources of energy—­ coal, oil, and natu­ral gas—­began to change the composition of the earth’s atmosphere. David Wallace-­Wells summarizes with characteristic vividness: “We have done as much damage to the fate of the planet and its ability to sustain ­human life and civilization since Al Gore published his first book on climate [in 1992] than in all the centuries—­all the millennia—­that came before.”8 While this is not quite precisely correct—­cumulative global emissions of CO2 ­were 847.78 billion tonnes in 1992 and 1.58 trillion tonnes in 20179—it certainly portrays the general situation accurately. Between 1992 and 2017, the total accumulation of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere had almost doubled as a result of the betrayal of the po­liti­cal pledges made in Rio. Elizabeth Kohlbert makes a similarly trenchant point about the fact that the global rate of emissions has been sharply accelerating ­every de­cade (and almost ­every year): “In the past ten years, more CO2 was emitted than in all of ­human history up to the election of J. F. K. [in 1960].”10 Or, another way to think of it, “burning the first trillion [barrels of oil] took about 130 years, but we went through the second trillion in only twenty-­two years.”11 Or, “the last 30 years have been the golden age of fossil fuels. Far more fossil fuels have been burnt in the past 30 years than in the entire nineteenth ­century.”12 The Greenland ice sheet alone has lost 4 trillion tons of ice since 1992.13 You get the trend. The 2019 edition of The Production Gap provided this summary: “In 2019, as climate impacts intensified, global fossil-­fuel combustion was at an all-­time high. Coal, oil, and natu­ral gas remain the world’s dominant sources of energy, accounting for 81% of total primary

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energy supply. Th ­ ese fuels are, by far, the largest contributor to global climate change, accounting for over 75% of global GHG emissions . . . ​and close to 90% of all carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.”14 In spite of the fact that fossil-­fuel emissions must reach net zero in only a few more years if average global temperature is to stabilize below a rise of more than 1.5°C, and in only a few years l­ ater to stabilize below a rise of more than 2°C, global sales and combustion of coal, oil, and natu­ral gas all continued to rise through 2019.15 One crucial ­factor is that while the use of clean fuels like solar and wind has increased surprisingly rapidly, this energy is mostly consumed on top of fossil-­fuel energy rather than replacing it.16 Total energy consumption steadily rises, and the alternative energy is largely an addition to, not a substitute for, fossil-­fuel energy. Successful policies ­will need, as we ­will see in chapter 5, to confront the fossil-­fuel regime head on and aggressively drive down the extraction and sale of coal, oil, and natu­ral gas. The current level of mitigation of fossil-­fuel emissions is not remotely ambitious enough. In fact, de­cades of past failure to confront climate change have now allowed such a large amount of additional emissions of fossil fuels that it is unavoidable that the total atmospheric accumulation of CO2 ­will exceed the carbon bud­get for any tolerable rise in average global temperature, at least temporarily. We must face this terrible result of our po­liti­cal failure unblinkingly. In addition to every­thing e­ lse that must be done, significant amounts of the CO2 injected into the atmosphere in recent de­cades by ­human energy consumption must be removed. We confront the necessity, then, for what the climate modelers initially called “negative emissions.” To begin, we must get past some clumsy labels and pos­si­ble terminological confusion, concerning three points. First, “negative emissions” refers to the reversal of emissions, that is, the extraction from the atmosphere of what has previously been injected into it by so-­called negative emission technologies (NETs). This phrase is clumsily nonintuitive terminology that is, I suspect, the product of hasty jargon-­coining by a

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number-­cruncher fixated on the fact that in this case the emissions would have a negative sign—­this would be an amount by which emissions ­were coming down rather than ­going up. This jargon is rather like calling the opposite of inhalation not “exhalation,” but “negative inhalation,” or referring to fasting as “negative eating.” To some extent, the label of “negative emissions” is more recently being replaced by “carbon dioxide removal” (CDR), which is certainly more intuitive and which is the phrase I ­will adopt ­here. CDR has the added advantage of sounding like operations performed on nature by ­human technologies, which is indeed what it would be. Second, the other bit of complementary new jargon is “overshoot”: the amount of fossil-­fuel emissions that exceed any given cumulative carbon budget—­the bud­get for any given amount of rise in average global temperature—is now referred to as the overshoot relative to that bud­get. The purpose of CDR, then, is, in the jargon, to eliminate emissions overshoots and bring the ­actual atmospheric concentration back inside a par­tic­u­lar cumulative carbon bud­get. When the climate modelers say that the temperature rise can be “kept” to a certain level, such as 1.5°C, what they usually mean is considerably less straightforward: that the temperature can be expected to stabilize at that level by around 2100 if any midcentury overshoot in emissions has meanwhile been reversed decisively enough. The idea is that the temperature as well as the level of cumulative emissions ­will unavoidably, as a consequence of po­liti­cal failure ­until now, exceed our targets in the ­middle de­cades of the c­ entury, but if it is feasible to eliminate the overshoot in emissions soon enough, the temperature ­will drop back down to target level by around 2100. Third, mitigation is more “ambitious” insofar as it contributes to reaching net zero emissions of CO2 globally at an ­earlier date—­ and therefore at a lower level of cumulative atmospheric accumulation of CO2, or within a smaller carbon bud­get.17 The “ambition” of a national commitment to mitigation, therefore, refers not only to the extent of the decarbonization to be conducted within a

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nation’s own borders, but also to the extent of the same nation’s financial support for decarbonization to be carried out elsewhere, which together have been aptly called its “dual obligations” for mitigation.18 A nation’s responsibility for mitigation may exceed its eco­nom­ ically sensible capacity to reduce its own domestic emissions, with what is eco­nom­ically sensible calculated at the global level; in that case, it ­ought to provide financial or technological transfers that enable the reduction of emissions in other nations. “Ambition” in the sense discussed h ­ ere, then, combines a nation’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) regarding reduction of its internal emissions with its financial and technological commitments in support of reduction of emissions elsewhere. How the ambition of individual nations should be divided between internal emissions reductions and external emissions reductions may be partly dependent on global-­level efficiency considerations, but its minimum total effort should reflect both its national historical responsibility, as explained in chapter 2, and its responsibilities of international and intergenerational justice, as we just saw in chapter 3. Contrasting Purposes of CO2 Removal

An influential 2016 study noted that the database of the Fifth Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released in 2014, “includes 116 scenarios that are consistent with a >66% probability of limiting warming below 2°C (that is, with atmospheric concentration levels of 430–480 ppm CO2eq in 2100). Of ­these, 101 (87%) apply global NETs in the second half of this ­century.”19 So 87% of the IPCC’s scenarios for the 2014 report that allow the target of 2°C to be achieved rely on NETs or, as I think it is now better to call them, CDR. The Special Report on 1.5 says, “All pathways that limit global warming to 1.5°C with ­limited or no overshoot proj­ect the use of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) on the order of 100–1000 GtCO2 over the

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21st ­century.”20 This heavy dependence on CDR for stabilizing at nondisastrous temperatures by 2100 is not widely appreciated by the general public. CDR can be intended to accomplish any one of three radically dif­f er­ent purposes: (1) enhancing current mitigation, (2) remedying insufficient past mitigation, and (3) rescuing fossil-­fuel companies’ stranded assets. I w ­ ill call t­ hese three types respectively “enhancement CDR,” “remedial CDR,” and “asset-­rescue CDR.”21 Asset-­rescue CDR is in the interest of no one except t­ hose whose wealth is tied up in reserves of, and infrastructure for, coal, oil, and natu­ral gas, which at pre­sent still includes, besides the companies themselves, socially impor­tant players like large pension funds that persist in clinging to stock in the companies. Pension funds ­ought to divest ­these holdings rapidly for reasons of both self-­ interest, since fossil-­fuel corporations are headed into decline,22 and morality, rather than expecting anyone other than the executives and ­owners of the companies to support asset-­rescue CDR, which I w ­ ill discuss no further.23 The first two purposes, enhancement CDR and remedial CDR, are distinguished as follows in Global Warming of 1.5 °C: “CDR can be used in two ways in mitigation pathways: (i) to move more rapidly t­ owards the point of carbon neutrality and maintain it afterwards in order to stabilize global mean temperature rise, and (ii) to produce net negative CO2 emissions, drawing down anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere in order to decline global mean temperature a­ fter an overshoot peak.”24 Enhancement CDR is essentially preventative: ambitious reductions in current emissions can be supplemented and augmented by the concurrent removal of previous emissions. At any given time, it may make no difference to the extent of climate change ­whether one less ton of CO2 is emitted or one more ton of previously emitted CO2 is extracted from the atmosphere. What ­matters, as we have seen, is the resulting cumulative total of CO2 in the atmosphere. If, for any given expenditure, one could reduce the subsequent atmospheric total more by CDR than one could by emissions reductions, then

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it would be more efficient to carry out the CDR rather than the mitigation, other ­things being equal, which, as we ­will see further just below, they often w ­ ill not be. At pre­sent, however, mitigation is far cheaper than CDR. For one t­ hing, any carbon removed would have to be sequestered securely for as long as ten thousand years, and the necessary infrastructure to do this at any significant scale is not in place or even concretely planned. Remedial CDR is essentially corrective: if mitigation (plus any enhancement CDR) had been ambitious enough and the atmospheric concentration of CO2 had not exceeded the carbon bud­ get for a tolerable average global temperature—in other words, if net zero CO2 emissions had been achieved at an early enough date to keep the temperature rise sufficiently small—no CDR for the second purpose of remedying overshoot would have been needed. But when the now-­inevitable overshoot in CO2 emissions has occurred, one or more forms of CDR ­will be needed to reduce the cumulative atmospheric concentration of CO2 back down to the level at which net zero CO2 emissions ­ought to have been attained. As I have already noted, action to control climate change has been so pathetic over recent de­cades that it is now virtually impossible to prevent an overshoot relative to the carbon bud­get for any “tolerable” rise in temperature. The only open question is how serious the overshoot ­will be and how much extra avoidable damage to society and nature an overshoot of that extent w ­ ill do. Preventing yet further damage w ­ ill of course then be crucial, and substantial CDR should if pos­si­ble be accomplished as long as it is ­doing more good than harm.25 What I was objecting to in “Climate Dreaming”—­and impor­ tant articles by o ­ thers have also objected to26—­was not CDR carried out for ­either of the above two purposes, but less ambitious reductions in emissions in the pre­sent on the excuse and groundless assumption that the emissions not forgone now can unproblematically be removed ­later. I was criticizing the folly of imagining that the desperate need for immediate ambitious reductions in emissions (augmented if pos­si­ble and efficient by enhancement

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CDR now) had been obviated by the apparent possibilities for removing CO2 ­later through remedial CDR. Any such glib confidence in “fixing it l­ater” with remedial CDR is deeply misguided for three major reasons that I w ­ ill begin to spell out shortly. The objection is not to remedial CDR as such, which w ­ ill be a good ­thing at some scale to alleviate unprevented overshoot. The objection is to allowing the awareness of hy­po­thet­i­cal remedial CDR ­later to provide a pretext for ­actual failures to mitigate as much and as rapidly as pos­si­ble now, causing the ­later overshoot to be larger than it would have been with more ambitious reductions now. The prob­lem is in part—­but certainly not entirely, as we w ­ ill see in the remainder of this chapter—­what ­lawyers tend to call “moral h ­ azard”: the supposed fact (accurate or not) that l­ater recovery is pos­si­ble from damage done by less care now tempts one to show less care now b ­ ecause one believes one has grounds for confidence about avoiding paying the price for the pre­sent carelessness. The less aggressive mitigation now, not the dreamedof remedial CDR ­later, is the fundamental ­mistake, although much depends on when, where, how much of, and what kind of remedial CDR is hoped for—­and actually accomplished. Some remedial CDR ­will be necessary, and additional enhancement CDR soon could lessen the amount of remedial CDR that becomes necessary: “Carbon removal does not avoid the need for rapid emissions cuts, which remain essential. But if removal can work at the required scale with acceptable impacts, using it in parallel with deep emissions cuts could substantially reduce climate risks. CDR at large scale could also make climate targets achievable that are out of reach with emissions cuts alone.”27 Small-­scale CDR using any of several techniques can on balance be helpful, and the worst prob­lems emerge only when one technology for CDR becomes large scale—if, for example, it requires extensive land, w ­ ater, or energy more urgently needed to grow food instead. The crucial issues for now are how much and what kinds of remedial CDR ­will have to be performed for the purpose of correcting past lack of action; and we must avoid

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leaving f­ uture p ­ eople to try to carry out larger-­scale remedial CDR than would have been needed but for our lack of effort at and investment in mitigation now, including enhancement CDR (up to some scale).28 Above all, the possibility of CDR l­ ater must not be allowed to motivate per­sis­tence in half-­hearted mitigation now in the utterly vain and totally groundless hope that CO2 removed ­later would be equivalent to CO2 emissions avoided now. It would not. The main purpose of this chapter is to show why not, that is, to explain why removal of CO2 ­later—­especially attempting removal at large scale—is not as good as e­ ither preventing CO2 from being injected into the atmosphere now or removing it by enhancement CDR now. Three in­de­pen­dent reasons converge to make a power­ful case against complacency now, grounded in hoped-­for remedial CDR ­later. Scaling Up in Time?

The first reason why removal ­later may not be as good as preventing the prob­lem from growing so large is that CDR at the scale that ­will be necessary if ambitious mitigation is not urgently implemented now may simply not be pos­si­ble in time, given how ­little has been invested in developing CDR ­until now. While this contingency may well be fatal to hopes that CDR can accomplish the second, remedial purpose, it is obviously farthest outside my competence as a po­liti­cal phi­los­o­pher. Nevertheless, since it is a potentially decisive challenge, it must at least be mentioned superficially. One of the conclusions of a major 2018 survey of techniques for CDR was that “a substantial gap exists between the upscaling and rapid diffusion of NETs implied in scenarios and pro­gress in a­ ctual innovation and deployment. If NETs are required at the scales currently discussed, the resulting urgency of implementation is currently neither reflected in science nor policy.”29 The IPCC’s Special Report in 2015 found that “most CDR technologies remain largely

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unproven to date and raise substantial concerns about adverse side-­effects on environmental and social sustainability.”30 In general, ­there is no mystery about the extraction of CO2 from the atmosphere. This is how trees and other plants live: they extract CO2 and combine it with other ele­ments through photosynthesis. ­Because ­there is substantially more vegetation (­because more land) in the Northern Hemi­sphere than in the Southern, total global atmospheric CO2 rises over the Northern winter when most Northern vegetation tends to be dormant, begins to drop in Northern spring as vegetation comes back into action, and reaches its annual low point at the end of Northern summer when photo­ synthesis has completed its maximum work for the year. Some ­people describe ­these remarkable seasonal falls and rises in CO2 as life on the planet as a ­whole inhaling and exhaling—­breathing in and out CO2. Of course, the vegetation in the oceans, the w ­ ater in the oceans, the soils on land, and other ele­ments of our planet do their own complex “breathing” of CO2 in ways that I do not pretend to understand very well but that need not concern us h ­ ere.31 The fact that trees (and other plants including aquatic ones) carry out a net removal of CO2 from the atmosphere is obviously why tree planting can help to control climate change—­some of the carbon taken in by a tree is kept and used and thus stored in the wood, safely out of the atmosphere at least temporarily ­until the wood is burned or decomposed. This is also why the ferocious megafires in California and Australia that w ­ ere made more likely by climate change are themselves positive feedbacks that make climate change worse still by driving up the atmospheric carbon level. And it is why the massive fire-­assault on the Amazon Forest by beef-­raising and soy-­growing Brazilian agribusinesses that grab more land without having to pay for it (and murder indigenous ­people who try to defend their forest homes), and that are cheered on by President Bolsonaro in the name of wildly implausible conceptions of national sovereignty and of economic development, are so damaging to all other living beings on the planet.32

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Our focus in this chapter is on the question of the proper role in policy on climate change for technologies of CDR, given that de­cades of failure to control emissions has made overshoot of most reasonable carbon bud­gets impossible to prevent at this late date. Technologies for CDR include afforestation, reforestation, soil carbon sequestration, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), direct air carbon capture and storage, and o ­ thers.33 Soil carbon sequestration, for example, makes soil more productive, thus partly paying for itself; is easy to implement; and is a relatively uncontroversially good way to capture some carbon. Afforestation and reforestation (and of course the even more vital prevention of deforestation) play positive roles up to the point at which the trees compete for land and w ­ ater with efficient and essential forms of agriculture, especially growing vegetables for direct h ­ uman consumption. Grazing beef on pasture converted from tropical forest and growing soybeans to feed Chinese pigs on land converted from tropical forest,34 as is increasingly happening in the Brazilian Amazon and in the Cerrado, are flagrantly extreme cases of grossly inefficient, totally unnecessary, and wildly destructive agriculture. Many other forms of meat production are also highly wasteful of and polluting of basic resources like land and ­water. ­Until agriculture started being conducted according to industrial princi­ples by agribusinesses, farms and forests coexisted happily in many dif­fer­ent combinations in dif­fer­ent parts of the planet. Plainly, the size of h ­ uman populations is another major ­factor in how much land and w ­ ater must be used even for the most land-­ efficient forms of food growing. Basically, trees can help the climate ­until they reach the scale at which they interfere with necessary mea­sures to feed p ­ eople, the extent of which depends on how many p ­ eople ­there are and what diet they eat. The further complications about farms and forests raise many vital issues, but we must s­ ettle for this superficial and broad glance ­here so that we can focus on the type of CDR that has been most strongly endorsed in climate policy: BECCS.

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In theory, BECCS would have the ­great merit that it actually produces net energy—­this is the bioenergy part—­while removing carbon from the atmosphere in two steps, initially through the photosynthesis involved in the growth of the biological material that is the feedstock for the combustion, and then through the CCS pro­cess that is supposed to capture most of the emissions from the combustion of the biomass that produces the energy. But BECCS has high land-­and water-­use intensity. The most widely cited study of BECCS found that, in order to remove 3.3 GtCO2 per year (3.3 Gt is 3.3 billion metric tons) from the atmosphere, the growth of conventional feedstocks for the bioenergy required would use approximately “3% of the freshwater currently appropriated for h ­ uman use” and “a land area of approximately 380–700 Mha in 2100,” which is one to two times the size of India!35 Using this much ­water and land to grow feedstocks for bioenergy would have serious repercussions for supplies and prices of food, and 3.3 GtCO2 per year is a small fraction of the remedial CDR that is likely to be needed. As Bellamy and Geden observe, “The scenario pathways in the [IPCC 2015 special] report that limit the warming to 1.5°C rely heavi­ly on CDR, with a median deployment of 730 GtCO2 removed over the course of the twenty-­first ­century. The latest estimates put annual anthropogenic CO2 emissions at 42 GtCO2, so the envisaged level of CDR is on the order of almost 20 years of ­today’s emissions.”36 Removing 3.3 GtCO2 per year would constitute canceling only about 8% of the current annual emissions of 42 GtCO2 per year. Now, all sorts of empirical complications are pre­sent, but we cannot possibly explore them h ­ ere. For example, although one obvious reason to worry about large-­scale BECCS is the massive amount of land and ­water it could use, bioenergy is not used only for removal of previous emissions, that is, not only as a kind of CDR in the form of BECCS. Bioenergy is also used to reduce emissions, that is, as a kind of mitigation in the form of transport fuel, like the highly subsidized ethanol beloved by politicians from the ­Middle West, substituting for fossil fuel. Less bioenergy for

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CDR would not necessarily mean less bioenergy overall—­indeed, it could mean more bioenergy for emissions reduction in order to reduce the need for emissions removal.37 Further, a g­ reat deal of research is being done on nonconventional BECCS feedstocks that might not require as much land and w ­ ater as needed by conventional feedstocks like Iowa corn and Brazilian and Indian sugar. On the other hand, however the feedstocks are grown, BECCS requires two monumental kinds of transport networks: the gigantic amounts of feedstock must constantly be transported to the fa­cil­i­ty in which the combustion w ­ ill occur to keep it supplied with fuel, and the CO2 captured by the CCS must be transported to a geological formation in which it can be securely stored for at least ten thousand years. Moving the feedstock would require vast numbers of trucks, trains, or other vehicles, and moving the captured CO2 would require vast systems of pipelines or tanker cars for liquified CO2 (liquified to make it less volatile for transport and storage). ­Little of this infrastructure exists, and few are seriously investing in it, least of all the fossil-­fuel companies whose product creates the prob­lem. Some BECCS facilities could be located near a geological reservoir (like empty oil fields u ­ nder the North Sea), and some could be located near the source of the feedstock, but ­there is no reason to think that all three could often be in the same place. If, for instance, the CO2 is g­ oing to be pumped ­under the North Sea into formations now emptied of fossil fuel, are the feedstocks g­ oing to be grown in the Scottish Highlands so that the BECCS fa­cil­i­ty can be on the Scottish coast? Not likely. In any case, all we need to understand for our purposes is that the feasibility and affordability of BECCS in par­tic­u­lar and CDR in general are open questions, especially at the large scale that is extremely likely to be needed. The difficulties already raised in the lit­er­a­ture have been producing consideration of a larger range of options, including “portfolios of multiple NETs, each deployed at modest scales.”38 Soil sequestration and reforestation at considerable scale, and BECCS at modest scale at least, for example, can surely help,39 but they cannot possibly produce anything like

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the median deployment of 730 GtCO2 removed that the scenarios modeled require. It is misguided simply to dream that however lackadaisical and underfunded our efforts at controlling climate change continue to be, f­ uture generations can simply repair every­ thing l­ ater with CDR. And t­ here is much more wrong with leaving climate change for ­future ­people to bring ­under control than the ­simple but impor­tant fact that it may in real­ity be pos­si­ble to fix only so much ­later, as we ­will see in the next two parts of this chapter. Meanwhile, we can note in passing that some proponents of solar radiation management (SRM) ­w ill see the difficulties in implementing massive CDR as reasons why we ­ought to pursue SRM instead of, or in addition to, CDR. I consider SRM a dangerous, unpredictable option that should be implemented, if ever, only as a last resort in desperate circumstances resulting from decisive failures in mitigation and CDR. The issues SRM raises are deep and complex, and a proper discussion of them would require an additional chapter for which I do not have space h ­ ere.40 Bequeathing Risks

We now turn to a normative analy­sis of the relation between the level of the present-­day ambition to stop contributing to climate change and the risk of danger for f­ uture generations—­between pre­sent inaction and ­future danger. We explore the structure of the risks created by ­every decision about how ambitiously to mitigate the primary ­factor forcing climate change, CO2, and thereby reveal the deepest objection to the current half-­hearted and half-­baked mitigation. The two main t­ heses in this section of the chapter are (1) that, in general, all decisions in the pre­sent about the degree of ambition for emissions mitigation are unavoidably also decisions about how to distribute risk across generations; and (2) that, more specifically, the less ambitious the mitigation is, the more inherently objectionable the resulting intergenerational risk distribution is.41 One of the most tempting ways by

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which a country’s policy-­makers can persuade themselves that less than a reasonable amount of mitigation now is permissible is by assuming that remedial CDR l­ater would be just as good as more mitigation now—by gambling that remedial CDR w ­ ill be fully equivalent to ambitious mitigation (including any enhancement CDR) now. This is not a reasonable g­ amble, as I w ­ ill now try to show. The following normative structural analy­sis of risk thus has strong implications for the standards of assessment by which to judge national implementation of the 2015 Paris Agreement, especially the extent of the ratcheting up of each nation’s NDCs as mandated by the Agreement. ­Every risk, as Hermansson and Hansson note, involves “three roles, namely the risk exposed, the decision-­maker and the beneficiary.”42 The three roles may be occupied respectively by one, two, or three parties. How the three roles are allocated among the parties involved gives the risk what I am calling its “structure.” In the simplest case, all three roles are occupied by the same person who chooses to g­ amble and receives the benefits or suffers the losses of the ­gamble. If, instead, for example, the decision-­maker is one party and a single other person is both the intended beneficiary and the risk-­exposed, the structure of the choice may be paternalistic.43 For instance, the legislature requires motorcycle helmets, and cyclists benefit from greater safety and suffer the loss of the thrill of greater danger. Or, to see a dif­f er­ent structure, take the typical choice by a firm to externalize the environmental costs of its operations. The firm is the decision-­maker about how much to pollute, and it is itself the beneficiary of the reduced costs relative to controlling the pollution, while third parties bear the costs and suffer the harms created by the pollution. Other ­people are stuck with the costs of dealing with the pollution in order to reduce production costs for the firm. This structure constitutes corporate exploitation of the public. We saw in chapter 2 that externalization at the national level—­sovereign externalization—­uses the remainder of the planet for waste disposal.

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John Rawls focused attention on a ­simple situation for choice between two alternatives, which I have modified in the following in impor­tant re­spects, partly following Stephen Gardiner.44 Alternative A has a high probability of producing a satisfactory outcome. Alternative B has three specific features: (1) it might produce trivial relative gains compared to A, (2) it might produce significant relative losses compared to A, and (3) attaining knowledge of the probability that it might produce the trivial gains rather than the significant losses “is impossible, or at best extremely insecure.”45 Manifestly, choosing alternative B would be paradigmatically imprudent—­alternative B is a very bad ­gamble, risking a substantial loss for the sake of a trivial gain in circumstances of uncertainty. Our fundamental choice with regard to climate change is about how ambitious to make mitigation now—­about when to aim to bring carbon emissions to net zero globally and leave b ­ ehind the era of fossil fuels. While a few of the initial NDCs made at Paris 2015 may have been adequate tentative first steps—­“first steps” coming three de­cades a­ fter they w ­ ere promised!—­most of the NDCs ranged in ambition from the merely perfunctory (e.g. the American) to the paltry (e.g. the Australian). To ­settle thus for unambitious mitigation now is to ­gamble that remedial CDR ­later by subsequent generations can rescue ­future ­people from what would other­wise result from our pre­sent complacency. More ambitious mitigation w ­ ill clearly impose some costs on some segments of the current generations. Nevertheless, if any sacrifices necessary for the sake of more ambitious mitigation are shared fairly—if contemporaries put into place fair distributive mechanisms—no life in current generations that is satisfactory now need become unsatisfactory ­because of the costs of ambitious mitigation. Mitigation through a transition to alternative sources of energy would itself make many p ­ eople much better off and some p ­ eople worse off. But t­ hose whose well-­being would decline can be protected against falling below a satisfactory level by fair mechanisms of transfer from ­those whose well-­being

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improves. For example, coal miners who become unemployed can be retrained for much safer and better jobs, or, if they are too old for retraining, be provided with unemployment benefits sufficient to support their families. Actually arranging for fairness in the distribution of the mitigation costs is a crucial assumption, of course. It is not enough that the transfers are pos­si­ble; they must be institutionalized. On the assumption just sketched, we can compare the situation of the current generation with the situation of the individual discussed by Rawls. Like that individual, the current generation must also choose between two options, in this case two tendencies in mitigation: more ambitious (prompt, large emissions reductions now, perhaps augmented by enhancement CDR) and less unambitious (reliance on the prospect that ­future ­people ­will be able to recover from the path we leave them on by using remedial CDR). More ambitious mitigation by the current generation with fair institutions could allow satisfactory outcomes for every­one now whose life would be satisfactory with less ambitious mitigation. On the other hand, to the extent that mitigation was less ambitious, it would tend to have three features: (1) it might produce minor relative gains for some ­people compared to more ambitious mitigation by avoiding some expense, effort, and disruption; (2) it might produce significant relative losses for some ­people compared to more ambitious mitigation by postponing the date of net zero carbon and thereby allowing climate change to become worse than it would be if mitigation ­were more ambitious early on, and (3) knowledge of the probability that it might produce the trivial gains but not the significant losses “is impossible, or at best extremely insecure.” David Weisbach has described what I take to be the same ­gamble between more and less ambitious mitigation in the pre­ sent as follows: “uncertainty about the effects of climate change strengthens t­ hese conclusions b ­ ecause the uncertainty is not symmetric: if we do nothing or act too slowly, the bad cases if ­things

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turn out worse than expected are far worse than the good cases are good if ­things turn out better than expected.”46 The ­gamble on less ambitious mitigation, then, is clearly at least as bad a ­gamble as the paradigm imprudent ­gamble that could have been taken by the individual described at the start following Rawls. In the mitigation ­gamble, we impose on f­ uture generations a ­gamble with a structure we could never reasonably choose for ourselves. And the less ambitious the mitigation, the worse the ­gamble, other ­things being equal, b ­ ecause the longer the period during which climate change can worsen, or even become catastrophic. The alternatives in the Rawlsian case and the alternatives in the climate case are not perfectly parallel. Rawls simply compares two fixed alternatives. Mitigation involves degrees: relatively more ambitious and relatively less. This difference is not problematic, however, ­because each case still involves a choice between two options. Two other monumentally morally significant differences between the structures of the two ­gambles are evident, however. In the Rawlsian case, first, the pos­si­ble gains or pos­si­ble losses would go to the same individual; and, second, the recipient of the pos­si­ble gains and losses is the person who decides ­whether to take the bad ­gamble. In contrast, in the mitigation case, the pos­ si­ble gains and pos­si­ble losses would go respectively to dif­fer­ent generations: the gains would go to the current generation, who would avoid what­ever expense, effort, and disruption would be involved in speeding up the energy transition through more ambitious mitigation and enhancement CDR, but the losses would go to ­future generations, who would suffer what­ever consequences resulted from worsened climate change occurring during the additional time prior to zero carbon emissions necessitated by less ambitious mitigation. So, first, the mitigation g­ amble is this: pos­si­ble gains for us, pos­si­ble losses for them. And, second, the decision w ­ hether to make the mitigation g­ amble is entirely in the hands of the generation who can only gain, the current generation—­the potential

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winners have all the power. The ­future generations who can only lose have no say whatsoever—­the potential losers have no power. ­These two differences combined turn what is inherently a bad ­gamble into a reckless ­gamble in which for the sake of pos­si­ble small gains for us the current generation imposes upon ­future generations what­ever losses might come from climate change worsened by casual mitigation now. And this objectionable structure would be pre­sent even if we had no reason to think that ­those losses for ­future generations w ­ ere especially likely or particularly serious. They are both. In the instance of the choice between less ambitious and more ambitious mitigation, the three roles that ­every risk involves are occupied by only two parties. One party, the current generation, is both decision-­maker and potential beneficiary. ­Future generations are exclusively the risk-­exposed. This is why decisions on mitigation in the pre­sent are decisions on risk distribution across generations. This structure, in which one party decides and potentially benefits itself, while another party is risk-­exposed, is exploitative. The decision-­maker sticks the risk-­exposed with the potential costs of potential benefit to the decision-­maker itself. This exploitative structure is exactly the same as the structure of the choice by a firm to externalize the costs of its pollution: less ambitious mitigation “externalizes” risks from current generations to f­ uture generations in order to save us modest cost and incon­ve­nience. This is the temporal analogue of sovereign externalization, dumping risks across time rather than across space. This can aptly be designated “temporal externalization.” Temporal externalization unjustly treats ­future ­people in a manner parallel to the way that sovereign externalization unjustly treats (noncompatriot) contemporaries. We can, therefore, make three normative judgements about any intergenerational ­gamble that chooses less ambitious mitigation in the pre­sent, even before we know anything about how likely or how serious the potential losses for ­future generations are. First, what would be a bad ­gamble for an individual to take upon herself

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could be, at the very best, an equally bad ­gamble for one generation to impose on other generations.47 And, the less ambitious the mitigation, the worse the ­gamble. The intergenerational case, however, is far worse than merely being a reckless ­gamble. For, second, a widely shared normative princi­ple is that while one is at liberty, with some qualifications, to choose for oneself to run what­ever risks one likes, one is not at liberty to impose the same risks on o ­ thers without their consent. I am f­ ree to take a bad ­gamble if I wish, but I am not f­ ree to impose a bad g­ amble on ­others who have no voice in the situation. I am instead bound to exercise due care on behalf of o ­ thers. One need not be risk averse on one’s own behalf, but one has a duty of care to be strongly risk averse t­ oward o ­ thers. Generations that for the chance of small benefits for themselves choose less ambitious mitigation that risks major harms and costs for ­others fail in this duty of care. The less ambitious the mitigation, the greater the failure. Third, I am all the more not f­ ree to impose on o ­ thers a bad ­gamble on which only I can gain and they can only lose—­this would constitute my using them strictly as a means to my own ends with no regard whatsoever for their purposes. Well beyond a ­simple failure of due care, this constitutes pure exploitation and a failure to exhibit minimal re­spect ­toward other ­people and their purposes. The pos­si­ble effects of the current foot-­dragging on mitigation are certainly nothing to impose on your descendants. This much is clear simply from the structure of the choice about risks. As David Weisbach has noted to me, this g­ amble comes exceedingly close to heads I win, tails you lose.48 Most harms from the current failure of mitigation w ­ ill descend upon p ­ eople in the ­future. Some benefits may accrue to ­people in the pre­sent, although it is seriously debatable how ­great the benefits are for anyone other than ­those who are invested in fossil-­fuel assets and its dependent infrastructure, like pipelines, oil tankers, and freight railroads. This is not the place to pursue the economic considerations, but it is worth noting in passing one of the economic

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arguments based in an only moderately long view of self-­interest in ­favor of ambitious current mitigation: Tackling the climate crisis ­will require the world’s largest ever peacetime investment. Historically low interest rates mean ­there has never been a better time to make it. Interest rates affect the entire economy, but are particularly impor­tant for renewables b ­ ecause the cost of borrowing has an outsized influence on their competitiveness. Fuel costs are essentially zero for green power—­sun, wind and ­water are ­free. That means capital expenditure is the biggest component of the average cost of producing renewable electricity. In other words, renewables’ costs tend to be front-­loaded, requiring upfront borrowing, and they deliver savings over time. The same is true of many technologies we need to reduce global emissions. It costs more to build well-­insulated ­houses, but less to run them. . . . ​ The cost advantage of renewables is startling.49 In addition, the need for extraordinary expenditures in order for economies to recover from lock-­downs b ­ ecause of the coronavirus create a uniquely propitious time to “build back better.” It may appear that the main argument above slides improperly from a case of prudence to a case of morality. The Rawlsian individual is deciding between two options on the basis of her rational self-­interest; it is not prudent for her to choose alternative B. The current generation is deciding between its own (comparatively minor, if not merely apparent) interest and the (potentially substantial) interest of f­ uture generations; it is not morally permissible, I am claiming, for the current generation to choose its own minor gain at risk of imposing major damage on ­future generations. The first Rawlsian choice is indeed a ­matter of prudence, and the second, a ­matter of morality. But the point is precisely that the structure that makes one of the two options in the individual choice imprudent, where the interest of only one person is at stake, makes one of the two options in the generational choice immoral, where the interests of additional generations are at stake

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and ­ought to be treated with care. ­Future ­humans, whoever the individuals turn out to be, deserve re­spect. The Reversible and the Irreversible

The incurable failing of all remedial CDR is the ratchet effect of passing tipping points for the climate during the period of “overshoot.” If some types of remedial CDR can be made to work at a global scale, then the atmospheric accumulation of CO2 can go down as well as up. But if that accumulation, even if it ultimately turns out to have been transitory itself, meanwhile drives some crucial ­factor affecting the climate past a point of no return, that change in climate ­will be permanent in spite of the fact that its cause was temporary. Temporary changes can produce permanent effects. This is the greatest danger from the current limp approach to mitigation by many incumbent politicians. For example, the cryogenic scientists who have concluded that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet prob­ably is now irreversibly melting think that the reason why the melting is irreversible is that the crucial Thwaites Glacier is a marine-­based ice sheet: it rests on land, but that land is underwater.50 And as the land on which the ice rests extends back inland away from the ocean, it slopes downward ­under the ice sheet. The forward edge of the glacier at its grounding line—­the last and highest point at which the ice sheet rests on land—is in contact with ocean w ­ ater. This opens the glacier to “basal melt by ocean heat flux”—­warm ocean ­water can melt the front of the bottom edge of the ice sheet.51 If, as is the case with Thwaites Glacier, the land on which the ice rests slopes downward as it moves inland, the melting ­water flows downhill, reducing the friction with the land u ­ nder the ice sheet and allowing the ice to slide more rapidly into the sea.52 No one has been able to see anything remotely feasible that could stop this pro­cess of enhanced melting now underway and accelerating. The function of Thwaites Glacier in the overall dynamics of WAIS is often analogized to the cork in a ­bottle: Thwaites is

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positioned now blocking a passage with elevated sides so that it holds back the remainder of WAIS from sliding more rapidly ­toward the sea. The same role of cork-­in-­the-­bottle for the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) is played by Totten Glacier. Totten too is a marine-­based ice sheet that several lines of evidence now suggest is also susceptible to basal melt by ocean heat flux.53 No one is claiming that the melting of EAIS too has become irreversible already—on the contrary, the point is that this may depend precisely on what we do in the pre­sent and immediate ­future. Consider, then, the following scenario; this is not a prediction, but simply a hy­po­thet­i­cal scenario to illustrate why remedial CDR is so far from being interchangeable with mitigation now. Suppose that the atmospheric concentration of CO2 continues to rise more than it would need to rise ­because of a short-­sighted and self-­centered policy choice now to g­ amble on less ambitious mitigation. The resultant “overshoot” in CO2 is eventually reduced through remedial CDR. But during the temporary period of emissions overshoot, the additional atmospheric accumulation drives an increase in the temperature of the ocean w ­ ater that bathes Totten Glacier at its grounding line sufficiently to precipitate the start of irreversible melting in the “cork” for a large chunk of East Antarctica as well. Totten Glacier by itself contains roughly the same amount of ­water as the entire WAIS—­equivalent to at least 3.5 m of global sea-­level rise—so adding the melting of Totten to the melting of WAIS would double the amount of sea-­level rise globally to 7 m (well over 20 feet, submerging tens of thousands of additional square miles of land into the oceans). That sea-­level rise would endure for millennia—­from a ­human perspective, forever. This despite the fact that the “overshoot” of atmospheric CO2 that launched the melting was eventually “reversed” by remedial CDR. The temperature itself might even (much) ­later come back down, although only long ­after the accumulation of CO2 was reduced, but the glacier might by then already have melted. Can we count on nothing like this hy­po­thet­ic­ al scenario happening? That is the

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g­ amble taken by self-­indulgently unambitious mitigation now that relies on remedial CDR l­ ater.54 In the current context, what is particularly repugnant morally about this scenario is the following. Prior to any awareness of the apparent possibility of “recovery” from emissions “overshoot” through remedial CDR, certain generations might have de­cided to be less ambitious about mitigation simply out of preoccupation with themselves and a s­ imple desire to avoid expense and disruption and to continue to enjoy con­ve­nience. We have seen that this would have amounted in fact to t­ hose generations taking a g­ amble in which only they themselves can gain and f­ uture generations can only lose. But ­those generations certainly might not have conceived of their actions in this way or been conscious that they ­were imposing such a bad ­gamble on ­future generations. By contrast, choosing less ambitious mitigation now precisely ­because we are aware that it w ­ ill allow the current generation to continue to produce avoidable emissions that we know ­will need to be reversed, only ­because we think ­future generations might be able to reverse them through remedial CDR, seems much worse, ­because more heartless and relentlessly self-­preoccupied. Mitigating less now in full consciousness that, and precisely ­because, ­later generations might be able subsequently to reverse (some of ) the additional emissions produced by the current less ambitious mitigation would be a clear case of choosing knowingly to make a prob­lem worse, when one could easily have made it better, merely ­because the additional risks of severely worse climate change knowingly created ­will fall on other generations. Even if the subsequent reversal of the emissions overshoot itself by means of remedial CDR w ­ ere entirely pos­si­ble and completely acceptable, such inaction now would be the height of callous self-­preoccupation and disregard of vulnerable o ­ thers. If, instead, as illustrated by the East Antarctic scenario above, the overshoot’s effects cannot be simply canceled out b ­ ecause in the interim physical tipping points are passed and more severe climate effects are ratcheted in, then such actions are outrageous. Why exactly outrageous?

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­ ecause worse than merely knowingly passing off the costs of B one’s own benefits to ­others (as in all externalization), one is in this temporal externalization knowingly passing off risks that are likely to compound and could pass the limits of social adaptation, as we saw late in chapter 1. Alternatively, what an exciting privilege it is to belong to the pivotal generation with the opportunity to carry out a once-­in-­ a-­civilization transition, one of history’s g­ reat revolutions, rivaling the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, whose dark side we would be confronting. The Energy Revolution, the building of a carbon-­free energy regime, can potentially not merely limit the damage from climate change, but create a far cleaner, safer, healthier, smarter, more diverse, more technologically advanced, and perhaps even more just world. It ­will naturally have its own dark side—we are already finding, for instance, that the exotic materials in the batteries critical to renewables, like lithium and nickel, bring their own prob­lems for both extraction and waste management. But if we can bequeath to ­future generations normal prob­lems, not extraordinary dangers, we ­will have made an exceptional contribution. Members of f­ uture generations ­will be glad that we ­rose to the occasion and perhaps remember us proudly. We may, as Scheffler put it, have left the party early, but we w ­ ill not have spoiled it for every­one e­ lse still to come. Annette Baier once strikingly suggested that “morality is the culturally acquired art of selecting which harms to notice and worry about.”55 Some of the most difficult harms to notice, by far, are t­ hose we are locking in for f­ uture generations for as long as we continue to expand the cumulative atmospheric concentration of CO2. The pre­sent is indeed the date-­of-­last-­opportunity to set a limit on the extent of climate change by minimizing the emissions “overshoot” that could carry the planet beyond crucial points of no return that need not be passed if instead we move quickly enough to net zero carbon. The generations alive now therefore bear distinctively awesome responsibilities, but for the same reasons we also hold in our hands the power to launch a historic,

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transformative transition into a far less dangerous world than the fossil-­fuel-­fed nightmare that the energy-­business-­as-­usual ­will other­wise yield. We now can create an invaluable legacy for the far f­ uture—­and only we: ­later ­will be too late. Radically dif­f er­ent ­futures are pos­si­ble, and the pre­sent generations ­will determine which versions of the ­future become more likely and which, less likely, by how passionately and wisely we act. Business-­as-­usual and toleration of the schemes of the dominant energy regime and its well-­financed po­liti­cal enablers would produce a f­ uture of climate change that is increasingly dangerous—in fact, dangerous without limit—­and likely feeding upon itself in abrupt and perhaps cascading departures from the weather and climate patterns that previously made what we perceive as normal pos­si­ble for the geologically exceptional millennia of the now-­ ending Holocene.56 It is almost impossible not to underestimate the distance over which the reach of the pre­sent extends into the far ­future in the case of climate. We cannot see nearly as far as our influence stretches. We are willy-­nilly making or allowing a world whose fundamental social structures and physical pro­cesses ­will endure ­until someone deliberately changes them, if they can. ­These basic structures and pro­cesses w ­ ill shape which possibilities are and are not open, at least initially, to the ­people who follow us in multiple ­future generations. Further change by them to reverse the effects of our action or inaction is not impossible in some cases, but it comes with vari­ ous prices in money, effort, and—­crucially—­time lost between attempted initiation of the reversal and its culmination. Often modification in the inherited structures and pro­cesses can come only with substantial time lags, sometimes lags of more than a single generation—­the generation that launches the modification does not live to see its outcome. And sometimes the effects of our choices are, from a practical, h ­ uman perspective, irreversible. Nothing that ­future generations could possibly do would tame some forces that we may unleash, and only the remaining basic

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natu­ral forces of the planet can—­over geological time, during the passage of hundreds of h ­ uman generations—­slow or reverse some of our effects. William Blake exaggerated less than he may have seemed in saying, as the Industrial Revolution heated up, “The generations of men run on in the tide of Time / But leave their destin’d lineaments permanent for ever and ever.”57 What, then, ­shall we do?58

5 Taking Control of Our Legacy We should not expect the interest groups facing an existential threat from climate policy—­fossil fuel companies and electric utilities—to go quietly into the night. . . . ​ Opponents do not passively accept policy defeat. . . . ​ Advocates cannot just focus on building the ­future. They must also dismantle the past. To transform our energy system and address the climate crisis head on, we must undermine opponents’ po­liti­cal power.1 In b ­ attles over the shape of ­future energy systems the possibilities for democracy are at stake. . . . ​Such demo­cratic strug­gles depend . . . ​upon identifying in current socio-­ technical systems their points of vulnerability.2 It is a serious error to over-­estimate the intelligence and foresight, let alone the wisdom, of the rich and power­ful.3 Power­ful Enemies, Allied Masses

We face a fierce b ­ attle—­not every­one is on the same side, by any means. The most unrelenting opponents of pro­gress ­toward a net zero carbon world are fossil-­fuel interests and their dedicated and 117

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entrenched allies in government and banking. We must no longer tolerate their deceptions, diversions, and detours. The strug­gle against them requires a broad mobilization of citizen energy: citizens joining and building social movements to replace the po­liti­cal and economic practices and structures that are blocking action on the climate. The po­liti­cal deck is now heavi­ly stacked in ­favor of the energy status quo. The opponents of ambitious action to move quickly to net zero carbon are ­those with vested interests in fossil fuel, and they are among the wealthiest and most power­ful individuals and organ­izations on earth. They are currently served by the heads of state of several critical nations—­Morrison in Australia, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Putin in Rus­sia, Mohammad bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, among ­others—­and a considerable number of US senators and representatives. Bringing climate change ­under control w ­ ill require tough po­liti­cal fights against ruthless, mendacious, and entrenched combinations of economic and po­liti­cal power. We are examining general ­human responsibilities, and so far, I have commented explic­itly on ­those of individuals and governments in wealthy nations like the United States whose wealth is heavi­ly derived from industrial activities and from lifestyles that are driven by the combustion of fossil fuels and that, as a result, are leading past and pre­sent ­causes of climate change. Among t­ hese responsibilities are uncontroversial universal negative duties not to violate rights or other­wise harm ­others. The firms that market coal, oil, and gas are of course not exempt from the universal negative duties not to harm that apply to every­one e­ lse. In their case, the primary specific form that the duty takes is not marketing harmful products or, if it ­were somehow necessary to market some harmful products temporarily, to inform potential buyers of ­those products of the nature and extent of the harm that the use of the products would do.4 Then the buyers could make an informed choice about w ­ hether to use the products, use them with appropriate restraint if they had to be used, and so forth. The fossil-­fuel companies have for de­cades flagrantly v­ iolated this universal minimal duty by knowingly pushing products that

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they understood long before most other p ­ eople did are progressively undermining the stability of the climate, by systematically lying about how harmful the use of their products is, by viciously attacking scientists who have told the general public the truth, and by utterly failing to invest in mea­sures that they also long ago understood well (like carbon capture and storage) that would have made their products safer.5 So now that they have habitually demonstrated an incorrigible refusal to fulfill minimal duties, the rest of us have no choice but to force them to change their business plans or to go out of business. We now must defend our own health and safety and protect the basic rights of the p ­ eople of ­future generations against the fossil-­fuel interests in addition to fulfilling our own original responsibilities. This is not the place for a systematic analy­sis of the po­liti­cal battlefield,6 but a few quick examples may illuminate the situation. Reducing our own contributions to climate change through modifications in our individual consumption is definitely worthwhile,7 but incremental, individual action is grossly insufficient even in aggregate. Bringing carbon emissions to net zero is not a ­matter merely of large numbers of individual consumers changing from one technology to another, like unscrewing incandescent bulbs and inserting LEDs, or even purchasing an electric or green hydrogen car. First, many more zero-­carbon technologies need research, development, and demonstration that w ­ ill often require supportive public policy. In order to make any significant difference, we need to build social movements to attack directly the economic and po­liti­cal structures that with all their influence and guile are blocking comprehensive po­liti­cal mea­sures to reduce carbon emissions and to replace ­those impediments with public policies and institutions designed to protect the majority of ­people of ­future generations, not to enrich further a power­ful minority in the pre­sent by protecting their business-­as-­usual.8 Unfortunately, while sales of fossil fuels may not be growing as rapidly as they used to, which is bad for their o ­ wners’ stock prices, their use is not yet shrinking over the long term (outside

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the duration of the coronavirus pandemic), which is bad for the climate and most living beings. The use of renewable energy is growing rapidly, but in itself this does nothing whatsoever to slow climate change. If the renewable energy is consumed in addition to, not instead of, carbon energy, the carbon emissions undermining the climate continue unabated. And most renewable energy is in fact an addition, not a replacement: “Most policies tend to focus on supporting low-­carbon alternatives, such as solar, wind, or electric vehicles, but t­ hese technologies often add to existing demand and therefore do not displace fossil-­fuel use to any ­great extent. Public policies need to place far more importance on directly cutting back the use of fossil fuels or removing their emissions through CCS [carbon capture and storage], particularly the phasing out of coal power plants and conventional vehicles, well before they reach their productive end-­of-­life.”9 Wallace-­Wells puts it dramatically: The much-­heralded green energy “revolution” . . . ​has yielded productivity gains in energy and cost reductions far beyond the predictions of even the most doe-­eyed optimists, and yet has not even bent the curve of carbon emissions downward. We are, in other words, billions of dollars and thousands of dramatic breakthroughs l­ ater, precisely where we started when hippies w ­ ere affixing solar panels to their geodesic domes. That is b ­ ecause the market has not responded to ­these developments by seamlessly retiring dirty energy sources and replacing them with clean ones. It has responded by simply adding the new capacity to the same system.10 This is bad news for every­one with naive faith that the use of fossil fuels would decline through some market magic if only renewables grew; and it is a clear example of the m ­ istake, noted by Stokes in one of the epigraphs, of failing to dismantle the institutions from the past that other­wise block the way ­toward the institutions for the ­future. Current failing policies fit perfectly with the desire of the ­owners of fossil fuels to continue to extract and sell them and

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to avoid even belatedly investing seriously in CCS, while instead continuing, as always, to pour their resources into exploration for ever greater reserves to extract and sell in ­future. In addition, major oil companies are vigorously resisting any decline in overall sales of their fossil fuels by moving increasingly into fracked gas for the manufacture of more plastics by their expanding petrochemical divisions.11 Shell Polymers, for example, is constructing a multibillion-­dollar ethane “cracker” plant on the Ohio River in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, to make ethylene for plastics from fracked gas.12 The plastics manufacturers buy extensive ads in ­favor of recycling in order to create the false impression that the fundamental prob­lem is not excess manufacturing and marketing of plastic, but negligent disposal by consumers, who have plastic virtually forced on them with every­thing they purchase.13 And the carbon interests are aggressively pressuring African countries to accept both plastics and plastic waste that the countries wisely reject.14 Fossil-­fuel interests are also fighting back with other vicious tactics like campaigning state by state for harsh laws to block demonstrations against new pipelines by restricting freedom of speech and freedom of assembly and ignoring indigenous rights.15 Meanwhile, ­o wners of some “zombie” pipelines and “orphaned” oil wells are engaging in a final act of destructive externalization extraordinaire. “Unlike most other industries, oil and gas is lawfully required to clean up its mess when the ­music stops,” which means “required to plug the well in a manner that permanently confines all oil, gas and w ­ ater in the separate strata in which they are originally found, and take other mea­sures necessary to restore the location to a safe and clean condition.”16 Instead, executives of failed companies are paying themselves obscenely large sums, declaring bankruptcy, and walking away from their asset retirement obligations (AROs). For example, “Chesapeake Energy, which declared bankruptcy last month a­ fter paying out executive bonuses, might also be environmentally insolvent . . . ​ with potential cleanup costs of $1.4 billion, nearly as much as its

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year-­end market value of $1.6 billion. Chesapeake’s filings show that it has set aside only $41 million in bonds to cover the cleanup of its 6,800 wells.”17 Performing the ARO for a typical fracked well costs around $300,000: “the true costs to plug deep U.S. shale wells may be one of industry’s best kept secrets.”18 Taxpayers in the state in which the well is located w ­ ill be left with the ARO costs—or with perpetually polluted land, groundwater, and air (from leaking methane).19 ­These ARO-­dodging executives thus bequeath to ­future generations “stranded liabilities” to complement their “stranded assets.”20 Marketing carbon-­based energy and carbon-­based materials like plastics is the source of wealth for what is arguably the most power­ful complex of multinational institutions in the world, with tentacles that reach deep into the main national and international po­liti­cal and economic structures. Many of the largest fossil-­fuel companies are state owned, state controlled, or both: Saudi Arabia’s Saudi Aramco, Rus­sia’s Gazprom and Rosneft, China’s PetroChina and Sinopec, the National Ira­nian Oil Co., Norway’s Equinor, and Coal India, for instance. “In 2018, nearly 60% of production of oil and 50% of production of gas came from state-­controlled oil companies.”21 This crucial fact about state-­ ownership is often overlooked by climate activists. Still, the “supermajors” among the investor-­owned firms, namely Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, and Total, are also huge. “The companies that supply and use fossil fuels make up a quarter of the global stock market and half the corporate bond market.”22 The US oil industry, for example, “directly and indirectly employs 10 million p ­ eople.”23 ExxonMobil and Rosneft are deeply interlinked, leading ExxonMobil to support Vladimir Putin on crucial issues, as are other state-­owned and investor-­owned firms.24 Then ­there is the privately owned but pervasively influential Koch Industries, one of the two largest private companies in the United States.25 The fossil-­fuel companies themselves are buttressed by the ser­ vice companies like Halliburton, Schlumberger, Transocean, and

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Fluor; their insurers like Liberty Mutual; the hedge funds that buy the stocks, like BlackRock (the world’s largest investor);26 the other pipeline companies besides Koch; the other refineries besides Koch; the liquified natu­ral gas facilities; the supertanker fleets; the freight lines with the coal cars and the oil tank-­cars; the lobbyists (who glide through the revolving doors between regulator and regulated) and their g­ iant PR firms; kept “think-­tanks,” kept “intellectuals,” and front organ­izations, who tell the sweet lies; and crucially the banks that loan the capital for the industry’s infrastructure and wait to be repaid over the infrastructure’s long, useful life. It goes without saying that the state-­owned companies are deeply embedded in the po­liti­cal and economic institutions of their respective power­ful nations, but so are the investor-­owned and privately owned companies on whose contributions many a US senator and representative depends to pay for campaign ads and social media operatives.27 For de­cades, public funds have gushed into the coffers of po­liti­ cally connected fossil-­fuel companies as subsidies: global government subsidies in 2015 ­were $4.7 trillion, which was 6.3% of global economic product perversely wasted—­unbelievably, more than the world’s total expenditure on public health!—­and the subsidies are projected to have been $5.2 trillion (6.5% of GDP) in 2017, and continuing.28 According to the 2019 IMF study just cited, the US federal government handed over $649 billion from US taxpayers to fossil-­fuel firms in 2015—­this welfare system for carbon majors operated long prior to the Trump administration and its sustained assault on environmental, health, and safety regulations29—­and the Rus­sian federal government provided $551 billion in public money to the oil and gas companies favored by Putin. The conservative IMF calculates that “efficient fossil fuel pricing in 2015 would have lowered global carbon emissions by 28 ­percent and fossil fuel air pollution deaths by 46 ­percent.”30 The survival of ­these utterly inefficient and murderous subsidies are often the product of deep and inveterate po­liti­cal corruption.31 The recession caused by the pandemic is initially wreaking havoc on fossil-­fuel companies as

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it is on many o ­ thers, but kept politicians can be counted on to bail the largest (“too big to fail”) private and state companies out of their difficulties during the recession with more public funds, and without any conditions requiring compliance with even the minimal necessities for action against climate change.32 The necessary transformation of economic and po­liti­cal structures requires far more than for the market to accept noncarbon energy at its own admittedly quickening pace (in spite of the market-­distorting subsidies and bailouts favoring fossil fuels). We must also, for example, get infrastructure for noncarbon energy production and transmission into developing nations who cannot afford both to adapt to the destructive climate changes that are already unleashed and to construct new energy infrastructure, so that their strug­gle to develop does not lock them into the infrastructure of the carbon energy regime that needs to be supplanted, as we saw in chapter 3. We need positive social action internationally, not only domestically. Planning the “Final Harvest”: Deceptive Delay

The fossil-­fuel companies appear to have added new tactics for their fight against climate action. The fundamental strategy of the fossil-­fuel interests always involves deceiving the general public. It is now well documented that corporate scientists understood the dangers of climate change de­cades before the public did, but com­pany executives de­cided to sell as much fossil fuel as pos­si­ble before the public caught on. The original strategy was to claim that the science was uncertain, as had been claimed e­ arlier on behalf of tobacco companies about the science showing that smoking ­causes cancer, and to provide de­cades of funding to organ­izations that would minimize or deny the dangers and attack genuine climate scientists. An accessible and recent summary of de­cades of opposition by oil companies to action to protect the climate is Smoke and Fumes: The L ­ egal and Evidentiary Basis for Holding Big Oil Accountable for the Climate Crisis.33 Electric utilities, which

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had sunk their capital into coal-­burning generation plants, also conducted a systematic campaign of deception.34 And the sophisticated mendacity on behalf of oil and gas continues ­today.35 Meanwhile, newer tactics of strategic deception include pretending to be on board efforts to deal with climate change and claiming to be ready to help fulfill the Paris Agreement of 2015, but slowing down the transition to net zero carbon as much as pos­si­ble in order, as before, to continue selling as much fossil fuel as pos­si­ble—­what Wallace-­Wells calls “profiteering delay.”36 Deceptive delay has augmented deceptive denial. Once the world decarbonizes, the unsold fossil fuels that currently give the petro-­ states and the carbon majors their wealth may lose much of that value, becoming stranded assets. So it is in their own narrow interest to “move it before they lose it”: “for Saudi Arabia, which has 75 years’ worth of oil in the ground, the most rational approach may be to pump as hard as pos­si­ble now.”37 Stokes has documented the general pattern: “­these companies win by stalling.”38 Or as the Texas bumper sticker in the 1980s said, “Please, God, give us one more boom. We promise not to piss this one away.”39 Three separate investigations reveal this fresh additional tactic in the misinformation strategy, instigated since the Paris Agreement of 2015, of pretending to cooperate in bringing down emissions while quietly carry­ing on exploration and extraction largely as usual and partly for newer purposes like plastics and “blue” hydrogen (hydrogen derived from natu­ral gas, as distinguished from “green” hydrogen derived from ­water). First, an investigation by the Guardian newspaper in 2019, prior to the recession caused by the coronavirus pandemic, concluded, “The world’s 50 biggest oil companies are poised to flood markets with an additional 7m barrels a day over the next de­cade. . . . ​New research commissioned by the Guardian forecasts Shell and ExxonMobil w ­ ill be among the leaders with a projected production increase of more than 35% between 2018 and 2030—­a sharper rise than over the previous 12 years. The acceleration is almost the opposite of the 45% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 that

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scientists say is necessary to have any chance of holding global heating at a relatively safe level of 1.5C. The projections are by Norwegian consultancy Rystad Energy, regarded as the gold standard for data in the industry.”40 University of Oxford energy economist Dieter Helm told the Guardian, “If we ­were serious about addressing climate change we would leave some oil in the ground, so t­ here is a scramble among big oil companies to make sure their assets are not the ones left stranded.”41 Second, complementary evidence is provided by government plans as distinguished from corporate plans as such, although of course the largest fossil-­fuel corporations are, as we noted above, state enterprises. The latest edition of a comprehensive annual study led by the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) in cooperation with several other leading environmental research institutes and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), The Production Gap 2020 Special Report, conducted “extraction-­based emissions accounting” that attributes emissions to the country within which the fossil fuel was extracted. Unusually, then, this study looks at the supply side of the fossil-­fuel regime. The key finding of the study is “to follow a 1.5°C-­consistent pathway, the world ­will need to decrease fossil fuel production by roughly 6% per year between 2020 and 2030. Countries are instead planning and projecting an average annual increase of 2%, which by 2030 would result in more than double the production consistent with the 1.5°C limit.”42 Although subsidies for fossil-­fuel consumption have recently been declining, “fossil fuel production subsidies are actually on the rise. . . . ​Leading providers of fossil fuel subsidies, by quantified monetary value, include Canada, China, Rus­sia, and the United States.”43 The need for government economic support for recovery from the economic recession caused by COVID-19 presented a unique historic opportunity, as the slogan has it, “to build back better” by creating jobs in alternative energy sectors rather than bailing out fossil-­fuel enterprises that need to be eliminated fairly soon and that, in many cases, ­were already struggling before COVID-19

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struck. At the global level, this rare opportunity is, however, being thrown away: “Despite widespread calls for a green recovery, as of November 2020, governments have directed more support to fossil fuel and other carbon-­intensive activities than to clean energy and low-­carbon sectors. One recent assessment suggests that most countries’ stimulus packages have been ‘environmentally harmful’ overall. . . . ​Another assessment finds that, as of early November 2020, government stimulus and recovery packages had committed nearly five times more to high-­carbon sectors, such as fossil fuel extraction, aviation, and car manufacturing (USD 878 billion), than to low-­carbon industries, such as electric vehicles, energy efficiency, and renewable energy (USD 179 billion).”44 This is a tragic and monumental failure in public policy that can be corrected most effectively by defeating incumbent politicians. Third, the clearest evidence of all about the fossil-­fuel companies’ strategy is of course their be­hav­ior. Many oil and gas companies trumpet in their social media and tele­vi­sion advertising that they are rapidly diversifying and turning themselves into “energy companies” rather than fossil-­f uel companies by investing in renewables.45 Instead, a recent analy­sis by the staid International Energy Agency (IEA) found this: “For the group of companies analysed, aggregate annual capital expenditures for proj­ects outside core oil and gas supply averaged ­under USD 2 billion since 2015, less than 1% of the total capital expenditures by ­these companies, though some companies have spent up to an average of 5%, and the total topped USD 2 billion for the first time in 2019.”46 Put the other way around, in the most recent years since the Paris Agreement in 2015, leading oil and gas companies have devoted an average of 99% of their capital expenditures into finding and selling more oil and gas, although some managed to restrict their expansion into carbon fuel to a mere 95% of their total investment!47 Where they put their money is decisive evidence of which side of the strug­gle to eliminate carbon emissions they are on. Meanwhile, they assure us through their massive public relations operations that they are serious about cutting carbon

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emissions, that they have a­ dopted a goal of net zero carbon, and that they are changing their fundamental nature. If their ­actual be­hav­ior qualified as gradualism, it would be the most leisurely gradualism imaginable and totally inappropriate to our stringent circumstances. It is instead obstructionism and dissembling, designed once again to deceive us into passivity while the oil and gas continue to flow alongside the sun and wind. Enabling the “Final Harvest”: Banks’ BAU

If one continues to follow the money, capital investment naturally leads back to the major holders of capital: banks, hedge funds, and other financial institutions who loan the fossil-­fuel regime most of the funds that enable capital investment in greater production. On sincerity, the banks and hedge funds score a l­ ittle higher than the fossil-­fuel companies ­because they mostly have not even pretended to care about climate change and have simply continued business-as usual (BAU). A few banks have recently pledged not to loan to companies planning to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,48 although this hardly counts as even a serious gesture, b ­ ecause drilling in a wildlife refuge when excess production has driven oil prices to their lowest level ever would be sheer vandalism. On the ­whole, banks, led by US banks, continue to pour money into additional exploration, production, and transport of oil and gas. Banking on Climate Change, an annual report on research led by the Rainforest Action Network, found that “35 banks from Canada, China, Eu­rope, Japan, and the U.S. have together funnelled USD $2.7 trillion into fossil fuels in the four years since the Paris Agreement was a­ dopted (2016–2019).”49 This is flagrantly irresponsible. The worst enabler of additional fossil fuel by far is JP Morgan Chase, which has loaned $269 billion just since the Paris Agreement in 2015, followed, in order, by Wells Fargo, Citi, Bank of Amer­i­ca, RBC (Royal Bank of Canada), MUFG ( Japan), and Barclays (Eu­rope’s most flagrant enabler).50 The largest increases

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in funding in 2019 ­were by Bank of Amer­i­ca and BNP Paribas.51 The big four Chinese banks—­Agricultural Bank of China, Bank of China, China Construction Bank, and ICBC (Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the largest bank in the world)—­gave the most support to the most primitive and dirtiest fossil fuel, coal, financing more than half of the world’s coal mining and coal power.52 The three largest recipients of fossil-­fuel loans ­were Occidental Petroleum (expansion of fracking), Enbridge (Line 3 tar sands oil pipeline in Minnesota), and TC Energy (Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline), all for proj­ects that o ­ ught to be s­ topped.53 Bank loans for capital expenditure on new pipelines are especially destructive of the climate ­because of their long time frames. The typical loan is for de­cades, and it can be repaid only if the infrastructure that it makes pos­si­ble is used throughout the de­cades of the loan’s lifetime. Obviously, this relies on de­cades of additional carbon emissions when carbon emissions o ­ ught instead to be rapidly approaching net zero. ­Here again, pre­sent action reaches deep into the ­future to cause damage. Further, what economists would call the “opportunity costs” of current bank policies are monstrous: all t­ hese funds could be underwriting alternative energy, which is already competitive in price nearly everywhere and only needs more investment and mildly supportive government policies. Exactly how to defend ­future generations against the current destructive bank practices is still being investigated and experimented with, but social movements are taking shape.54 Meanwhile, we should minimally demand that all institutions in which we are involved, including local governments, withdraw all funds from the most grievously offending banks, move the funds to local banks and credit ­unions that do not loan to fossil-­fuel companies, and refuse to apply for mortgages, loans, or credit cards from the banks underwriting the worst environmental destruction. Divestment stigmatized fossil-­fuel companies, so perhaps highly vis­i­ble boycotts can help to stigmatize irresponsible banks.55 The vulnerability of ­future generations is so extreme that we cannot in good

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conscience continue to do so ­little to protect them, and the time for decisive action is so short that we cannot tolerate leisurely gradualism, much less deception, on the part of the carbon majors and myopically obstinate greed on the part of the state and multinational banks. Preventing the “Final Harvest”: The Active Many vs. the Ruthless Few

Efforts to control climate change, then, face entrenched and interlinked opposition by major incumbent governments and major fossil-­f uel firms and their financial supporters. I have focused ­here on why they must be confronted directly. This global web of vested, interlocked interests in wealth and power is working against ­those of us trying to limit climate change. It ­will take a while to extricate our politics and institutions from the grip of this strong and slippery politico-­economic web. The fossil-­fuel firms are profoundly recalcitrant institutions whose core business is marketing products that produce carbon emissions and whose very existence is threatened by action to limit climate change soon, if they continue to persist in refusing to make radical changes to their business plans. That overcoming opponents this well-­entrenched, determined, and ruthless, who have systematically lied to the public for de­cades, ­will take some time is one more reason why the pre­sent is the date-­of-­last-­opportunity to launch vigorous and determined exposure and opposition. Time is in short supply, so the fight needs to be intensified now. The grubby, greedy, grasping, dog-­eat-­dog version of extractive capitalism practiced by firms in the fossil-­fuel industry like ExxonMobil, Shell, Koch Industries, Gazprom, and Saudi Aramco are an embarrassment to decent business p ­ eople. In order to resist them, one need not be anticapitalist—­only antirapacity.56 What are undoubtedly needed are broad structural changes to the energy system. B ­ ecause of the wealth and power of the carbon status quo, many of the changes needed require government action, which

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presupposes a government with a level of responsiveness to its citizens that does not currently exist in Australia, Brazil, Rus­sia, Saudi Arabia, the US Senate and House, and elsewhere. The most impor­tant action that readers of this book, who are likely to live in one of the countries with some degree of democracy, can take is to join with o ­ thers to remove from po­liti­cal power as many as pos­si­ble of the friends of fossil fuel. Matto Mildenberger has put this crisply: “We need to first disrupt the po­liti­cal power of carbon polluters before we can effectively reshape economic incentive structures. . . . ​Carbon polluters ­will not voluntarily relinquish their power. . . . ​Climate change mitigation is a po­liti­cal act. . . . ​ Effective policies must reduce carbon pollution while also disrupting opponents’ po­liti­cal power.”57 Fossil fuels cannot compete on their own: more than ever, they need the po­liti­cal favoritism and subsidies that they have long enjoyed. Po­liti­cal mea­sures have lifted them up, and po­liti­cal mea­sures can bring them down. ­Every election now needs to be about climate change. ­Every candidate who refuses to commit to ambitious mitigation of carbon emissions and to plans for rapid pro­gress t­ oward net zero carbon must be soundly defeated and replaced with someone who is strongly committed to limiting damage to the climate. This means ­r unning for office, encouraging other good ­people to run for office, contributing to the financing of campaigns, campaigning, and fully exposing in all available media the rampant favoritism and corruption. For instance, in order to expose the corrupt relationships between the supermajors and vicious dictatorships like the Obiangs in Equatorial Guinea, Section 1504 of the 2010 Dodd-­Frank Wall Street reform law, originally sponsored by Republican Senator Richard Lugar, needs to be restored. The elimination of this requirement of transparency was one of the first and most valuable gifts in 2017 by Congress and President Trump to Big Oil.58 Social and po­liti­cal change, not just individual behavioral change, are essential. Nevertheless, according to some highly respected financial analysts, the fossil-­fuel regime is beginning to stumble for partly

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economic reasons. If so, we still need to give it several very hard shoves to make sure it goes all the way down! Such sector disruption often comes sooner than one might expect and occurs at or shortly before peak demand. “The fossil fuel system is ripe for disruption. It is low growth, high fixed cost, low return and (incredibly) planning on expansion even as demand peaks. The entire system is being disrupted by the forces of cheaper renewable technologies and more aggressive government policies. In one sector ­after another t­ hese are driving peak demand, which leads to lower prices, less profit, and stranded assets.”59 “The cheapest source of bulk electricity production in 85% of the world is renewables. . . . ​Nearly three quarters of new global electricity capacity is now non-­fossil. This is impor­tant ­because electricity is the largest share of fossil fuel consumption, accounting for over one third of the total.”60 Solar costs have dropped 99% in the last four de­cades.61 Institutional investors in the stock market look for companies that can expect long-­term growth in demand for their products. Fossil-­fuel companies are approaching, if they have not already reached, peak demand ­because renewables are soaking up most of the growth in demand. “The energy sector has been a weak performer in the S & P 500 for a de­cade [2010–2019], and the supermajors’ [Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Total, and Royal Dutch Shell] lackluster results have contributed to that underper­for­ mance.”62 ExxonMobil’s “market value t­ oday is about a third of what it was in 2008, when it approached $500 billion,”63 and its stock has been humiliatingly dropped from the calculation of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.64 The heartless strategy of attempting to prop up demand for fracked gas by flooding the planet, especially relatively defenseless African nations, with vastly more plastic is considered by hard-­ headed analysts at the Carbon Tracker Initiative to be likely to fail, leaving the oil and gas companies with still more stranded assets, this time in the form of excessive capacity in the new petrochemical installations now being hastily constructed (relying, of course, on bank loans—­ones that appear unlikely ever to be repaid). Only

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about 5–10% of plastics are actually recycled, which is one more huge negative externality inflicted on society by fossil fuels; and manufacturing 1 ton of plastic produces approximately 5 tons of CO2, which would mean that on current business plans, the plastics industry would use 19% of the total remaining cumulative carbon bud­get by 2040, which would be an outrageously wasteful misuse of a shrinking asset.65 The Carbon Tracker Analyst Note just cited calmly concludes, “To have one sector planning on doubling its carbon footprint while the rest of the world plans to phase out emissions clearly makes no sense”66; and “this [plastics] is not an industry which has focussed at all on efficiency or maximising utility. It is a bloated behemoth, ripe for disruption.”67 The Big Banks need to be persuaded to stop denying the real­ ity of how risky long-­term loans to fossil-­fuel companies have become. Restoration of Section 1504 would contribute by revealing the true basis of some extraction contracts with poor countries in bribery and other forms of corruption. Research done for Finance Watch has recommended that banks increase their risk weightings for coal, oil, and gas exposure in order to avoid what it calls the “climate-­finance doom loop,” in which “fossil fuel finance enables climate change, and climate change threatens financial stability, through disruptive natu­ral events. . . . ​Banks would therefore have more protection against the risk of carbon assets becoming ‘stranded’ if demand falls—or the risk of costly climate disruption if it does not.”68 So one message for the bankers who have not comprehended what is happening is that even if they do not care about the rest of us or the planet itself, they might want to stop shooting themselves in the foot with increasingly risky long-­term loans for unsustainable proj­ects, including both exploration/extraction and rushed construction of petrochemical plants to manufacture ocean-­clogging plastics. That climate change is a threat to the fundamental stability of financial markets is being recognized increasingly widely, even in some cases by establishment institutions directed by Trump appointees, such as the Commodity ­Futures Trading Commission.69

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We cannot have an all-­purpose tactical program. We must be agile, innovative, and quick to pounce into openings. Leif Wenar, writing about a dif­fer­ent but related prob­lem, provides beautiful examples of tactical imaginativeness, such as what he calls “tapering.”70 Naomi Klein emphasizes analyzing the system for “chokepoints,”71 and Timothy Mitchell brilliantly shows how the “points of vulnerability,” as he calls them in one of our epigraphs, available to the British coal miners during the Industrial Revolution when coal was absolutely essential enabled them to use general strikes to enhance democracy generally as well as to improve conditions for themselves.72 And t­ here are many more of us who are threatened than t­ here are of them who are profiteering. As Jonathan Schell put it in another context, “The active many can overcome the ruthless few.”73 Once po­liti­cal and financial decisions begin to be made more nearly on their merits, dirty and damaging fossil fuels can be driven into decline.74 Extraction and import can be regulated, for example, to require the removal from the atmosphere by the seller at its own expense of amounts of CO2 at least equal to the CO2 content of any fuel sold, fi­nally limiting additional harm.75 In the United States, once po­liti­cal dominance at the federal level has been wrestled away from the friends of fossil fuel, outrageous subsidies can be ended, and pollution controls arbitrarily and capriciously gutted by the Trump Administration can be restored, strengthened, and enforced. The United States can show leadership ­under the Paris Agreement and greatly strengthen the weak NDCs made by the Obama Administration. And much, much more—­vastly increased requirements for transparency about plans to reach net zero enforced by financial regulators, lawsuits on a wide variety of grounds, increasing divestment, boycotts, demonstrations, and relentless exposure of ­actual be­hav­ior to resist relentless deception.76 I was originally drafting this paragraph on Earth Day 2020. My last employer, the University of Oxford, announced that it would belatedly divest completely from fossil fuels. And, showing

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some genuine leadership, Oxford also instructed its endowment fund man­ag­ers to invest across the board only in corporations with net zero business plans. (We are still waiting for Harvard.) To some extent, this is only symbolic, but it does demonstrate that even ponderous institutions can be persuaded and pressured into changing. Net zero business plans w ­ ill work better when governments are seriously committed to net zero public policies (as the UK government claims to be), and vice versa. Removing from power all the politicians who are blocking serious action to reduce emissions rapidly and forcing carbon majors to change radically or go out of business is still an uphill ­battle. But governments are supposed to protect their ­people, so it is nevertheless a ­battle that must be won, and soon, especially for the sake of vulnerable ­future p ­ eople whose fates are held in the hands of the living. We can perhaps still act just in time. It is very impor­tant that it never becomes likely that the earth’s climate w ­ ill run wildly out of control. We do not know exactly how urgent action is b ­ ecause of the very uncertainties that some opponents of action irrationally invoke in support of business-­as-­usual. The time to establish a limit on climate change is now—­while we still can. The stakes are far too high relative to the insignificance of the lifestyle we need to give up in order to return h ­ uman civilization to a much safer place. Pogo—­I show my age again—­said, “We have met the e­ nemy and he is us.”77 This is profoundly true of climate change b ­ ecause our passivity and inattention have allowed fossil-­fuel interests to dominate energy policy and energy politics for a c­ entury. But it could also become true that we have met the allies and they are us. We have agency—­our response to our time is our choice. The direction the f­ uture takes is up to us, if our pivotal generation takes back the initiative from the entrenched interests who ­will undermine the climate rather than willingly surrender any of their wealth and power. A clear view of the situation raises the practical questions: who is ­going to lead the turn away from the path that may have a maelstrom at its unseen end, and when are they ­going to get started?

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The answer, I have tried to show, ­ought to be: us now. We are the pivotal generation, and the responsibility falls on us. We can recapture control of our destiny and our legacy by restoring demo­cratic control of our politics and accelerating the revolutionary energy transition that ­will brighten the ­human ­future. This is the crucial po­liti­cal fight of the twenty-­first c­ entury. It is too impor­tant to lose from lack of thought, effort, and endurance. We can do this, but we have to start d ­ oing it now.

ACKNOWL­E DGMENTS

Chapter 1 includes greatly revised versions of arguments originally presented in the 2017 John Dewey Lecture at the Law School of the University of Chicago and in a 2017 James A. Moffett ’29 Lecture in Ethics at Prince­ton University. Neither lecture has been published. It also develops themes about time initially introduced in Henry Shue, “Responsibility to ­Future Generations and the Technological Transition,” in Perspectives on Climate Change: Science, Economics, Politics, Ethics, ed. Walter Sinnott-­Armstrong and Richard B. Howarth (Amsterdam and San Diego: Elsevier, 2005), 265–283; reprinted in Henry Shue, Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 225–243. Chapter 2 draws upon arguments originally introduced in Henry Shue, “Historical Responsibility,” Technical Briefing for Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-­term Cooperative Action u ­ nder the Convention (AWG-­LCA), SBSTA, UNFCC, Bonn, 4 June 2009, http://­unfccc​.­int​/­files​/­meetings​/­ad​_­hoc​_­working​_­groups​/­lca​ /­application​/­pdf​/­1​_­shue​_­rev​.­pdf; and it extensively reworks and elaborates the version of ­those arguments formulated in Henry Shue, “Historical Responsibility, Harm Prohibition, and Preservation Requirement: Core Practical Convergence on Climate Change,” Moral Philosophy and Politics 2 (2015), 7–31, doi:10.1515/ mop-2013–0009. Two paragraphs in chapter 1 also take sentences from the latter. Chapter 3 draws upon, substantially revises, and expands arguments from Henry Shue, “Distant Strangers and the Illusion of Separation: Climate, Development, and Disaster,” in The Oxford

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Handbook of Global Justice, ed. Thom Brooks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 259–276. Chapter 4 draws upon, substantially reformulates, and integrates arguments from two e­ arlier articles: Henry Shue, “Climate Dreaming: Negative Emissions, Risk Transfer, and Irreversibility,” Journal of ­Human Rights and Environment 8 (2017), 203– 216, doi:10.4337/jhre.2017.02.02; and Henry Shue, “Mitigation ­Gambles: Uncertainty, Urgency, and the Last G ­ amble Pos­si­ble,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 376 (2018), 1–11, doi:10.1098/rsta.2017.0105.

APPENDIX ON IN­E QUALIT Y

Chapter 2 discusses the extent of in­equality among nations in causing climate change, which is normally mea­sured in cumulative national carbon emissions, or cumulative national per capita carbon emissions, and which has resulted primarily from the fact that some nations industrialized ­earlier and became much wealthier than o ­ thers. B ­ ecause climate negotiations have mostly been conducted by national governments in international fora, ­these inequalities in historical national responsibility have received some attention, if insufficient action. Inequalities in wealth among individuals, however, are even more outrageously extreme than inequalities in wealth among nations. Some very wealthy individuals live in very poor nations—­ indeed, frequently the nations remain poor in part b ­ ecause the families of their dictators systematically steal the national wealth by, for example, diverting the proceeds of oil drilling, mining, and other extraction of natu­ral resources.1 What may be a ­little less widely understood is that differences in individual wealth lead by way of differences in consumption choices to differences in the extent of causation of climate change. Research reported in 2020 by the Stockholm Environment Institute and Oxfam has led to some startling estimates.2 The findings for the years 1990–2015 included the following: The richest 10% of the world’s population (c. 630 million ­people) ­were responsible for 52% of the cumulative carbon emissions—­depleting the global carbon bud­get by nearly a third (31%) in ­those 25 years alone; 139

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The poorest 50% (c. 3.1 billion ­people) w ­ ere responsible for just 7% of cumulative emissions, and used just 4% of the available carbon bud­get; The richest 1% (c. 63 million ­people) alone ­were responsible for 15% of cumulative emissions, and 9% of the carbon budget—­t wice as much as the poorest half of the world’s population; The richest 5% (c. 315 million ­people) ­were responsible for over a third (37%) of the total growth in emissions, while the total growth in emissions of the richest 1% was three times that of the poorest 50%.3 Oxfam and SEI conclude, The global carbon bud­get is being rapidly depleted, not for the purpose of lifting all of humanity to a decent standard of living, but to a large extent to expand the consumption of a minority of the world’s very richest p ­ eople. . . . ​Doubling the per capita [carbon] footprint of the poorest 50% of the world’s population from 1990 to 2015 would have increased total global emissions by less than the growth in emissions associated with the richest 1% in this period.4 ­These differences in the consumption of the rich and the poor mean that some mea­sures to reduce carbon emissions can rightly be targeted specifically at what I have called the “luxury emissions” of the wealthy rather than the “subsistence emissions” of the poor.5 Among the mea­sures endorsed by Oxfam and SEI are “wealth taxes, luxury carbon taxes—­such as carbon sales taxes on SUVs, private jets or super yachts, or levies on business class or frequent flights.”6 A careful economic explanation for the kind of findings made by Oxfam and SEI is laid out in another recent study, whose basic conclusion is that “in­equality in the distribution of energy footprints varies across dif­f er­ent goods and ser­vices. Energy-­intensive

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goods tend to be more elastic, leading to higher energy footprints of high-­income individuals. . . . ​­People with dif­fer­ent purchasing power make use of dif­fer­ent goods and ser­vices, which are sustained by dif­fer­ent energy quantities and carriers.”7 A recent thought-­p iece offers an accessible account of the economic assumptions and sketches a number of imaginative rationales that converge on vari­ous luxury carbon taxes.8 As I have emphasized throughout, we must before very long reach net zero carbon emissions with no one emitting any CO2 that is avoidable. But we have strong economic and ethical reasons for moving immediately against the superfluous luxury emissions of the affluent as one part of a broad program. Self-­indulgent unnecessary emissions by the wealthy few are morally intolerable when they are threatening the climate for every­one from now on. Momentary selfishness c­ auses millennial damage. We are responsible for protecting our defenseless descendants against our careless contemporaries. If not us, who? If not now, when?

NOTES

Chapter 1: The Pivotal Generation 1. Annette Baier, “The Rights of Past and ­Future Persons,” in Responsibilities to ­Future Generations: Environmental Ethics, ed. Ernest Partridge (Buffalo, NY: ­Prometheus Books, 1981), 171–183, at 177. 2. Andreas Malm, The Pro­g ress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World (London: Verso, 2018), 1. 3. Elizabeth Kolbert, “What W ­ ill Another De­cade of Climate Crisis Bring?,” New Yorker, 5 January 2020, https://­www​.­newyorker​.­com​/­magazine​/­2020​/­01​/­13​/­what​ -­will​-­another​-­decade​-­of​-­climate​-­crisis​-­bring. 4. Jonathan Watts, Jillian Ambrose, and Adam Vaughan, “Oil Companies Scrambling to Raise Output in Final ‘Fossil Fuel Harvest,’ ” Guardian, 11 October 2019, Special Investigation: The Polluters, 12–13. The significance of the plan for a final harvest of fossil fuel is discussed in chapter 5. 5. David Hume, A Treatise of ­Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-­Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 437. 6. In focusing specifically on responsibility, I am restricting myself to only one of the four ele­ments in Simon Caney’s fourfold schema for a normative account of climate change; see his “Climate Change and Non-­Ideal Theory: Six Ways of Responding to Non-­Compliance,” in Climate Justice in a Non-­Ideal World, ed. Clare Heyward and Dominic Roser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 21–42. 7. William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (London: Vintage, 1996), act 1, scene 3, 85. 8. Timothy Mitchell, “Afterword to the Paperback Edition,” in Carbon Democracy: Po­liti­cal Power in the Age of Oil (New York: Verso, 2013), 260. 9. William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, The Complete Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, ed. William Allan Neilson and Charles Jarvis Hill (Cambridge MA: Riverside Press, 1942), act 3, scene 2, ll. 80–81. 10. William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 73,” Complete Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare. 11. See, for example, Friederike Otto with Benjamin von Brackel, Angry Weather: Heat Waves, Floods, Storms, and the New Science of Climate Change, trans. Sarah Pybus (Berkeley and Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2020). 12. For two wonderfully dif­fer­ent ways of showing this, see David Wallace-­Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the ­Future (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2019);

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and Mary Robinson with Caitríona Palmer, Climate Justice: Hope, Resilience and the Fight for a Sustainable ­Future (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018). 13. BP, Statistical Review of World Energy, 69th ed. (2020), “All Data 1965–2019, Carbon Dioxide Emissions,” https://­www​.­bp​.­com​/­en​/­global​/­corporate​/­energy​ -­economics​/­statistical​-­review​-­of​-­world​-­energy​.­html. Click on download titled “Statistical Review of World Energy—­All Data, 1965–2019”; choose “Carbon Dioxide Emissions (from 1965)”; inspect the line labeled “Total World” and note that total for 2019 (34,169) is the largest total since 1965. 14. See “Trends in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide,” NOAA, Earth System Research Laboratories, Global Monitoring Laboratory, 5 April 2021, https://­www​.­esrl​.­noaa​.­gov​ /­gmd​/­ccgg​/­trends​/­monthly​.­html. Also see Henry Fountain, “ ‘Like Trash in a Landfill’: Carbon Dioxide Keeps Piling Up in the Atmosphere,” New York Times, 4 June 2020; and “Global Carbon Bud­get: Data,” Global Carbon Proj­ect, 11 December 2020, https://­ www​.­globalcarbonproject​.­org​/­carbonbudget​/­20​/­data​.­htm. 15. “NOAA Annual Green­house Gas Index [AGGI],” NOAA, Earth System Research Laboratories, 2020, ­table 2, “Global Radiative Forcing, CO2 Equivalent Mixing Ratio, and the AGGI 1979–2019,” Spring 2020, https://­www​.­esrl​.­noaa​.­gov​/­gmd​ /­aggi​/­aggi​.­html. Also see David King and Rick Parnell, “Stopping Climate Change Could Cost Less Than Fighting Covid-19,” Washington Post, 17 September 2020. 16. Myles R. Allen et al., “Framing and Context,” in Global Warming of 1.5 °C, ed. Valérie Masson-­Delmotte et al., Special Report (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018), 49–91, https://­www​.­ipcc​.­ch​/­sr15​/­chapter​/­chapter​-­1​/­. 17. Myles Allen et al., “Summary for Policymakers,” in Masson-­Delmotte, Global Warming of 1.5 °C, 1–24, https://­www​.­ipcc​.­ch​/­sr15​/­chapter​/­spm​/­. 18. For links to a collection of relevant e­ arlier articles, see “The Climate Connection to California’s Wildfires,” New York Times, 8 September 2020. 19. A prescient discussion of ­these issues is Catriona McKinnon, Climate Change and ­Future Justice: Precaution, Compensation, and Triage (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012). 20. B. Ekwurzel et al., “The Rise in Global Atmospheric CO2, Surface Temperature and Sea Level from Emissions Traced to Major Carbon Producers,” Climatic Change 144 (2017), 579–590, at 587, doi:10.1007/s10584-017-1978-0. 21. Chapter 4 is devoted to CDR, which the integrated assessment models (IAMs) used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) invoke most heavi­ly. Each of the other technologies raises its own specific issues, which I do not have space ­here to examine. 22. Martin Luther King  Jr., “I Have a Dream,” March on Washington, 28 August 1963, https://­www​.­americanrhetoric​.­com​/­speeches​/­mlkihaveadream​.­htm. 23. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), 289: “They try to piece together a just savings schedule by balancing how much at each stage they would be willing to save for their immediate descendants against what they would feel entitled to claim of their immediate pre­de­ces­sors.” 24. Whoever the individuals turn out to be—­Rawls correctly takes for granted that basic rights do not depend on individual identities.

NOTES TO C h a p te r 1 145

25. Rawls, Theory of Justice, 287. 26. It may be worth highlighting at an abstract level the difference between tasks that cannot be passed on to ­future generations, which are the subject of the first observation about Rawls, and burdens and risks that can be—­and sometimes inevitably are—­passed on to ­future generations, which are the subject of the third observation. What I refer to as the “integral fabric” of history means that a challenge sometimes arises in one par­tic­u­lar generation, and if the challenge is not dealt with then, it never can be dealt with ­because a unique opportunity is lost and circumstances move on. In chapter 3, I w ­ ill introduce the notion of the date-­of-­last-­opportunity to focus on such last chances. For example, if nation A is invaded by nation B, the current generation of nation A confronts the task of defending against the invasion. They cannot pass on to the next generation the task of defense against the invasion b ­ ecause their failure to defend would mean that nation A is conquered, and the opportunity for successful defense is lost. The next generation of nation A may confront the task of rebelling against entrenched conquerors and expelling them, but that is a dif­f er­ent and presumably more difficult task. My first observation, then, is that some tasks are not transferable across time: the defense must occur now before the conquest is completed. The third observation is that some burdens are transferable, and, most notably, the failure to perform a nontransferable task (like defense) transfers to some ­future generation the burden of providing for the nation’s autonomy (by expelling entrenched conquerors). It makes no sense—­except perhaps as a sort of curse against the universe—to complain that facing a nontransferable task is unfair, ­because this kind of task cannot be redistributed. But it can make complete sense to complain that bearing a transferable burden is unfair if an ­earlier generation was responsible for dealing with it and failed to do so, thereby dumping onto you the burden, which may now require per­for­mance of a more difficult task than the task that t­ hose originally responsible failed to perform. I am indebted to Catriona McKinnon for spotting the pos­si­ble confusion ­here. 27. Roger Revelle and Hans E. Suess, “Carbon Dioxide Exchange between Atmosphere and Ocean and the Question of an Increase of Atmospheric CO2 during the Past De­cades,” Tellus 9 (1957), 18–27, at 19. 28. William K. Stevens, “Scientist at Work: Wallace S. Broecker; Iconoclastic Guru of the Climate Debate,” New York Times, 17 March 1998. 29. See Paul J. Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” Nature 415 (2002), 23: “It seems appropriate to assign the term ‘Anthropocene’ to the pre­sent, in many ways human-­ dominated, geological epoch. . . . ​­Unless ­there is a global catastrophe . . . ​mankind w ­ ill remain a major environmental force for many millennia. . . . ​At this stage, however, we are still largely treading on terra incognita.” 30. Joeri Rogelj et al., “Energy System Transformations for Limiting End-­of-­ Century Warming to below 1.5 °C,” Nature Climate Change 5 (2015; corrected 2016), 519–528 and 538 (corrigendum), doi:10.1038/nclimate2572; and Joeri Rogelj et al., “Differences between Carbon Bud­get Estimates Unravelled,” Nature Climate Change 6 (2016), 245–252, doi:10.1038/nclimate2868.

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31. For wonderfully lucid and imaginative explanations of planetary mechanics, see Richard B. Alley, The Two-­Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our ­Future, rev. ed. (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2014). 32. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan or the M ­ atter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, n.d. [1651]), First Part, Chapter XIII, 82. 33. Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth ­Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), xxvi and 28–29; and Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth ­Century, abr. and rev. ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), xxi and 26. Also see Sam White, A Cold Welcome: The ­Little Ice Age and Eu­rope’s Encounter with North Amer­i­ca (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); and Philipp Blom, Nature’s Mutiny: How the ­Little Ice Age Transformed the West and ­Shaped the Pre­sent (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019). 34. Michael T. Klare, All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019), 40–48. 35. Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (New York: Vintage Books, 2016), 325–326. 36. For power­ful considerations in ­favor of taking pos­si­ble extinction very seriously, see Toby Ord, The Precipice: Existential Risk and the F ­ uture of Humanity (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020). One exploration of unraveling is Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright, Climate Leviathan: A Po­liti­cal Theory of Our Planetary F ­ uture (London: Verso, 2018). 37. See Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine Keeble Wilkinson, eds., All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions to the Climate Crisis (New York: One World, 2020). 38. Henry Shue, “Deadly Delays, Saving Opportunities: Creating a More Dangerous World?” (2010), reprinted in Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 263–286. 39. Lauren Hartzell-­Nichols, A Climate of Risk: Precautionary Princi­ples, Catastrophes, and Climate Change (New York: Routledge, 2017). 40. For saving me from a serious error at this point, I am im­mensely grateful to Catriona McKinnon. 41. Simon Caney, “Justice and Posterity,” in Climate Justice: Integrating Economics and Philosophy, ed. Ravi Kanbur and Henry Shue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 157–174. 42. See Timothy M. Lenton et al., “Climate Tipping Points—­Too Risky to Bet against,” Nature 575 (2019; corrected 2020), 592–595; and further references ­there. Also see Zeke Hausfather and Richard Betts, “Analy­sis: How ‘Carbon-­Cycle Feedbacks’ Could Make Global Warming Worse,” Carbon Brief, 14 April 2020, https://­www​ .­carbonbrief​.­org​/­analysis​-­how​-­carbon​-­cycle​-­feedbacks​-­could​-­make​-­global​-­warming​ -­worse. Hausfather and Betts note, “Analy­sis for this article shows that feedbacks could result in up to 25% more warming than in the main IPCC projections.” 43. Malm, Pro­gress of This Storm, 73. 44. Thus the two requirements specified in Shue, “Deadly Delays, Saving Opportunities,” are satisfied. The classic study is Timothy M. Lenton et al., “Tipping Ele­ments

NOTES TO C h a p te r 1 147

in the Earth’s Climate System,” Proceedings of the National Acad­emy of Sciences of the USA 105 (2008), 1786–1793. Also see David Frame and Myles R. Allen, “Climate Change and Global Risk,” in Global Catastrophic Risk, ed. Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Ćirković (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 273–275. On tipping points for Antarctica and Greenland, see Frank Pattyn et al., “The Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets u ­ nder 1.5 °C Global Warming: Review Article,” Nature Climate Change 8 (2018), 1053–1061, doi:10.1038/s41558-018-0305-8. On tipping point for Amazon, see T. E. Lovejoy and C. Nobre, “Amazon Tipping Point: Last Chance for Action,” Science Advances 5 (2019), eaba2949, online, open access, https://­advances​.­sciencemag​.­org​ /­content​/­5​/­12​/­eaba2949; also see Anthony Faiola, Marina Lopes, and Chris Mooney, “The Price of ‘Pro­gress’ in the Amazon,” Washington Post, 28 June 2019. 45. Convention on Biological Diversity, Global Biodiversity Outlook 5, Summary for Policy Makers, 18 August 2020, https://­www​.­cbd​.­int​/­gbo5. Also see Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014); World Wide Fund for Nature and Zoological Society of London, Living Planet Report 2020: Bending the Curve of Biodiversity Loss, summary, 2020, https://­livingplanet​.­panda​.­org​ /­voices​/­a​-­life​-­on​-­our​-­planet; and Matthew Green, “Climate Change Could Trigger Sudden Losses of World’s Wildlife: Study,” ­Reuters, 8 April 2020, reporting on a study in Nature whose lead author Alex Pigot commented, “We found that climate change risks to biodiversity d ­ on’t increase gradually. . . . ​It’s not a slippery slope, but a series of cliff edges, hitting dif­fer­ent areas at dif­fer­ent times.” 46. ­Will Steffen et al., “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene,” Proceedings of the National Acad­emy of Sciences of the United States of Amer­i­ca 115 (2018), 8252–8259, doi:10.1073/pnas.1810141115; and Juan C. Rocha et al., “Cascading Regime Shifts within and across Scales,” Science 362 (December 2018), 1379–1383. For cascading bad h ­ uman health effects, see Nick Watts et al., “The 2018 Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change: Shaping the Health of Nations for Centuries to Come,” Lancet 392 (December 2018), 2479–2514, doi:10.1016/S0140–6736(18)32594–7. 47. For more extensive, power­ful arguments to a similar conclusion, see Simon Caney, “Climate Change and the F ­ uture: Discounting for Time, Wealth, and Risk,” Journal of Social Philosophy 40 (2009), 163–186. The probabilities of the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet are ­today, however, no longer considered “very low” (178)—or even low, as we have seen above. 48. Another example of a tipping point that, based on a quite dif­f er­ent kind of evidence (years of sediment cores), appears already to have been passed is the Louisiana marshes on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico—­see Chris Mooney, “Loss of Louisiana Marshes That Protect New Orleans Is ‘Prob­ably Inevitable,’ Study Finds,” Washington Post, 22 May 2020. The Tulane geologist who led the study of the cores is quoted as saying, “We are, if you believe this study, past the tipping point. . . . ​This region, it’s severely wounded.” Not only is the sea rising, but the land’s defenses are collapsing, in part b ­ ecause of the oil and gas pipelines that lacerate this part of the Mississippi Delta. 49. Chris Mooney and Brady Dennis, “Ice Loss from Antarctica Has Sextupled since the 1970s, New Research Finds,” Washington Post, 14 January 2019, reporting on Eric Rignot et al., “Four De­cades of Antarctic Ice Sheet Mass Balance from

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1979–2017,” Proceedings of the National Acad­emy of Sciences of the United States of Amer­i­ca 116 (2019), 1095–1103, doi:10.1073/pnas.1812883116. Also see Chris Mooney, “At This Rate, Earth Risks Sea Level Rise of 20 to 30 Feet, Historical Analy­sis Shows,” Washington Post, 20 September 2018, reporting on David J. Wilson et al., “Ice Loss from the East Antarctic Ice Sheet during Late Pleistocene Interglacials,” Nature 561 (2018), 383–389, doi:10.1038/s41586-018-0501-8. And also see Julia Jacobs, “Gigantic Cavity in Antarctica Glacier Is a Product of Rapid Melting, Study Finds,” New York Times, 1 February 2019, reporting on P. Milillo et al., “Heterogeneous Retreat and Ice Melt of Thwaites Glacier, West Antarctica,” Science Advances 5, eaau3433 (2019), 1–8, https://­advances​.­sciencemag​.­org​/­content​/­5​/­1​/­eaau3433​.­full. 50. Thomas Slater et al., “Review Article: Earth’s Ice Imbalance,” Cryosphere 15 (2021), 233–246, doi:10.5194/tc-15-233-2021. Also see Michael Wood et al., “Ocean Forcing Drives Glacier Retreat in Greenland,” Science Advances 7 (2021), 1–10, doi:10.1126/sciadv.aba7282. For an accessible account of the disturbing significance of the latter research, see Chris Mooney and Andrew Freedman, “Earth Is Now Losing 1.2 Trillion Tons of Ice Each Year. And It’s ­Going to Get Worse,” Washington Post, 25 January 2021.

Chapter 2: The Presence of the Past 1. Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory,” in Toni Morrison: What Moves at the Margin, ed. Carolyn C. Denard, quoted in Emily Raboteau, “Lessons in Survival,” New York Review of Books, 21 November 2019, 13–15, at 15. 2. Andreas Malm, The Pro­g ress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World (London: Verso, 2018), 96–97. 3. Václav Havel, Letters to Olga, June 1979–­September 1982, trans. Paul Wilson (Boston and London: Faber and Faber, 1988), letter 138, 350. 4. I explain in chapter 4 why it is irrational and immoral to continue extraction-­as-­ usual now in hope that CO2 removal can ­later reverse the damage done. 5. Philippe Ciais et al., “Carbon and Other Biogeochemical Cycles,” in Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis, ed. Thomas F. Stocker et al., Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 465–570, at 472–473. 6. “Outcome of the 24th Session of the Conference of the Parties (COP24) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC),” US Department of State, Office of the Spokesperson, Media Note 288121, 15 December 2018, http://­ www​.­government​-­world​.­com​/­press​-­releases​-­outcome​-­of​-­the​-­24th​-­session​-­of​-­the​ -­conference​-­of​-­the​-­parties​-­cop24​-­to​-­the​-­un​-­framework​-­convention​-­on​-­climate​ -­change​-­unfccc​/­. 7. I am grateful to Janina Dill for g­ ently prodding me to be more explicit about individual and state—­and their tortuous relationships. 8. For an excellent critique of some of the usual arguments, see Megan Blomfield, Global Justice, Natu­ral Resources, & Climate Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 178–192.

NOTES TO C h a p te r 2 149

9. Simon Caney has suggested that this emphasis on contribution to the prob­ lem rests on the deeper princi­ple “that persons should take responsibility for their actions and ends”—­see his “­Human Rights, Responsibilities, and Climate Change,” in Global Basic Rights, ed. Charles R. Beitz and Robert E. Goodin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 227–247, at 241. Caney notes that this princi­ple is an impor­ tant assumption frequently invoked explic­itly by John Rawls—­see, for example, John Rawls, Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 261 and 284. 10. SEI (Stockholm Environment Institute) et al., The Production Gap: The Discrepancy between Countries’ Planned Fossil Fuel Production and Global Production Levels Consistent with Limiting Warming to 1.5°C or 2°C, 2019, 8, https://­productiongap​.­org​ /­2019report​/­. 11. Health Effects Institute, State of Global Air 2020: Special Report (Boston: Health Effects Institute, 2020). 12. Benjamin Franta, “Early Oil Industry Knowledge of CO2 and Global Warming,” Nature Climate Change 8 (2018), 1024–1026, doi:10.1038/s41558-018-0349-9; Neela Banerjee, “Exxon’s Oil Industry Peers Knew about Climate Dangers in the 1970s Too,” Inside Climate News, 22 December 2015, https://­insideclimatenews​ .­org​/­news​/­22122015​/­exxon​-­mobil​-­oil​-­industry​-­peers​-­knew​-­about​-­climate​-­change​ -­dangers​-­1970s​-­american​-­petroleum​-­institute​-­api​-­shell​-­chevron​-­texaco; and David Hasemyer and John H. Cushman Jr., “Exxon Sowed Doubt about Climate Science for De­cades by Stressing Uncertainty,” Inside Climate News, 22 October 2015, https://­ insideclimatenews​.­org​/­news​/­22102015​/­exxon​-­sowed​-­doubt​-­about​-­climate​-­science​ -­for​-­decades​-­by​-­stressing​-­uncertainty​/­. Also see chapter 3, notes 10 and 17; and chapter 5, notes 31 and 33. 13. Simon Caney similarly maintains that the basis for the responsibility of the inheritors is not primarily their own contribution to climate change, but their acquiring goods produced by pre­de­ces­sors who contributed to climate change. This is one of the continuities. In addition, many of the inheritors do also continue to be contributors to further climate change. See Caney, “­Human Rights, Responsibilities, and Climate Change,” at 240n53, and 244n57. 14. See Henry Shue, “Transboundary Damage in Climate Change: Criteria for Allocating Responsibility,” in Distribution of Responsibilities in International Law, ed. André Nollkaemper and Dov Jacobs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 321–340. 15. Myles R. Allen et al., “Framing and Context,” in Global Warming of 1.5 °C, ed. Valérie Masson-­Delmotte et al., Special Report (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018), 49–91, https://­www​.­ipcc​.­ch​/­sr15​/­chapter​/­chapter​-­1​/­. Also see SEI et al., Production Gap 2019, 8. 16. I have been highlighting this distinction since my first article about climate change in 1992; see “The Unavoidability of Justice,” reprinted in Henry Shue, Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 41n11. In her fine book, Global Justice, Natu­ral Resources, & Climate Change, Blomfield is especially alert to the significance of this distinction.

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17. This is why I cannot simply invoke the power­ful arguments in Daniel Butt, Rectifying International Injustice: Princi­ples of Compensation and Restitution between Nations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 18. It ­will also have substantial benefits, although some individuals ­will incur more costs than benefits. In any case, the fairness argument leaves aside relative benefit and focuses strictly on the allocation of costs. 19. See Dan Tong et al., “Committed Emissions from Existing Energy Infrastructure Jeopardize 1.5 °C Climate Target,” Nature 572 (2019), 373–377, doi:10.1038/ s41586-019-1364-3. 20. See W ­ ill Englund, “As Covid-19 Hits, Coal Companies Aim to Cut the Tax They Pay to Support Black-­Lung Miners,” Washington Post, 8 April 2020; Taylor Kuykendall “Murray Energy Executives Saw Ailing Coal Com­pany as Own ‘Piggy Bank’—­Creditors,” S&P Global Market Intelligence, 5 May 2020, https://­www​.­spglobal​ .­com​/­marketintelligence​/­en​/­news​-­insights​/­latest​-­news​-­headlines​/­creditors​-­murray​ -­energy​-­execs​-­saw​-­ailing​-­coal​-­company​-­as​-­own​-­piggy​-­bank​-­58440831; Jeremy Hill, “Lender Says Murray Energy ­Violated Deal in ‘Brazen’ Loan Default,” Bloomberg, 13 May 2020, https://­www​.­bloomberg​.­com​/­news​/­articles​/­2020​-­05​-­13​/­lender​-­says​ -­murray​-­energy​-­violated​-­deal​-­in​-­brazen​-­loan​-­default; and Chris Hamby, Soul Full of Coal Dust: A Fight for Breath and Justice in Appalachia (New York: ­Little, Brown, 2020). 21. Jules L. Coleman, “The Morality of Strict Tort Liability,” William and Mary Law Review 18 (1976), 259–286, at 286. I am grateful to Catriona McKinnon for this source and for insightful comments on this issue. 22. If space permitted, one could examine a series of variants on the basic story. 23. Leslie Hook, “Climate Change: How China Moved from Leader to Laggard,” Financial Times, 25 November 2019. 24. The objections I w ­ ill explain to what I w ­ ill call externalization are not grounded in inefficiency and waste, as the strictly economic objections are, but in rights violation, unfairness, and destructiveness. Below I w ­ ill explain the objections separately for wrongful harms and ordinary costs. For a clear statement of the standard economic objection to externalities, see John Broome, Climate ­Matters: Ethics in a Warming World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), 39–40. 25. Amitav Ghosh, The ­Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 59. He goes on to write of “unbearably intimate connections over vast gaps in time and space,” having noted, “No less than they mock the discontinuities and bound­aries of the nation-­state do ­these connections defy the boundedness of ‘place,’ creating continuities of experience between Bengal and Louisiana, New York and Mumbai, Tibet and Alaska” (63 and 62). 26. David Archer, The Long Thaw: How ­Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2009), 172–173. Quoted and perceptively interpreted in a discussion of the “genealogy of the carbon economy” by Ghosh, ­Great Derangement, 108–111. 27. It is somewhat contentious to deny that such damage is wrongful harm, and this is not a thesis to which I am attached. It can be reasonably argued that unnecessarily damaging the property of o ­ thers, and especially damaging historical buildings, public

NOTES TO C h a p te r 2 151

monuments, and other property belonging to society as a ­whole is wrong. If so, what I am labeling ordinary costs and wrongful harms would need to be distinguished instead as something like harms to nonhumans and harms to ­humans. 28. For brief arguments about corporate responsibility, see Henry Shue, “Responsible for What? Carbon Producer CO2 Contributions and the Energy Transition,” Climatic Change 144 (2017), 591–596, doi:10.1007/s10584-017-2042-9. For fuller argument, see Marco Grasso, “­Towards a Broader Climate Ethics: Confronting the Oil Industry with Morally Relevant Facts,” Energy Research & Social Science 62 (2020), 1–11, doi:10.1016/j.erss.2019.101383. 29. Recently I have briefly set the rights violations within a more general framework in Henry Shue, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy, 40th anniv. ed. (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2020), chapter 8. 30. See Henry Shue, “Avoidable Necessity: Global Warming, International Fairness, and Alternative Energy” (1995), reprinted in Shue, Climate Justice, 89–108. 31. Mary Robinson with Caitríona Palmer, Climate Justice: Hope, Resilience and the Fight for a Sustainable ­Future (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018). 32. See Henry Shue, “Eroding Sovereignty: The Advance of Princi­ple,” in The Morality of Nationalism, ed. Robert McKim and Jeff McMahan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 340–359, at 353–354; reprinted in Shue, Climate Justice, 142–161, at 156; and Henry Shue, “Share Benefits and Burdens Equitably,” Working Paper (Dublin: Mary Robinson Foundation–­Climate Justice, 2014). 33. I have briefly discussed this remark in “­Human Rights, Climate Change, and the Trillionth Ton” (2011), reprinted in Shue, Climate Justice, 297–318, at 302. 34. This could change if excessive emissions ­were interpreted as a source of transboundary damage of the kind prohibited by customary international law. See Michael G. Faure and André Nollkaemper, “International Liability as an Instrument to Prevent and Compensate for Climate Change,” Stanford Journal of International Law, 43A (2007), 123–179; René Lefeber, “Climate Change and State Responsibility,” in International Law in the Era of Climate Change, ed. Rosemary Rayfuse and Shirley V. Scott (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2012), 321–349; and Shue, “Transboundary Damage in Climate Change.” Liability u ­ nder international law for transboundary damage generally does not require fault, but only breach of a prohibition. 35. Dale Jamieson describes it this way: “The benefits from the activities that cause climate change accrue primarily to t­ hose who are members of par­tic­u­lar po­liti­cal communities, while the costs are borne primarily by ­those who are not members of ­those communities. Costs are borne by ­those who live beyond the borders of the major emitters”; see Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Strug­gle against Climate Change Failed—­ and What It Means for Our ­Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 100. 36. I presented a briefer argument about this issue in “Global Environment and International In­equality” (1999), reprinted in Shue, Climate Justice, 180–194, at 182–183. 37. I discuss them in Shue, Basic Rights, 111–130. 38. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. Richard Crawley, (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1910), book V.89. Christian Reus-­Smit argues convincingly, contrary to the usual interpretation, that Thucydides meant this as the statement of a corrupt norm to

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be resisted, not a natu­ral law of po­liti­cal be­hav­ior to be acknowledged; see The Moral Purpose of the State: Culture, Social Identity, and Institutional Rationality in International Relations (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1999), 60. 39. Leslie Hook, “China Ramps Up Coal Power in Face of Emissions Efforts,” Financial Times, 20 November 2019. China plans to spend $30 billion to build new coal-­burning power plants in other countries ­under the ­Belt and Road Initiative; see Hook, “Climate Change.” 40. At the time of writing, the worst of ­these irresponsible utilities include Duke Energy and Southern Com­p any; see Justin Gillis and Michael O’Boyle, “When ­Will Electricity Companies Fi­nally Quit Natu­ral Gas?,” New York Times, 12 November 2020. 41. It also rests on a deeper philosophical m ­ istake about the relation of domestic justice and international justice; see Henry Shue, “The Burdens of Justice,” Journal of Philosophy 80 (1983), 600–608. 42. Shue, “Global Environment and International In­equality,” 185. 43. In order to avoid secondary complications, I have in this chapter intentionally left aside the ability to pay. As Simon Caney has argued, responsibilities to other states based on causal contributions are conditional upon having the ability to pay without neglect of one’s own citizens; and if action by t­ hose with responsibility based on contribution is not adequate to deal with the prob­lem and leaves a “remainder,” the ability to pay is a ground for action by ­others; see Caney, “­Human Rights, Responsibilities, and Climate Change,” 238–245. I have made some relatively minor criticisms of Caney’s interpretation ­there of ­earlier arguments of mine in Henry Shue, “Historical Responsibility, Harm Prohibition, and Preservation Requirement: Core Practical Convergence on Climate Change,” Moral Philosophy and Politics 2 (2015), 7–31 at 24–27, doi:10.1515/mop-2013–0009. 44. The term was recommended in P. J. Crutzen and E. F. Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene,’ ” IGBP Global Change Newsletter [Stockholm] 41 (2000), 17–18, reprinted at http://­www​.­igbp​.­net​/­news​/­opinion​/­opinion​/­haveweenteredtheanthropocene​.­5​ .­d8b4c3c12bf3be638a8000578​.­html. The suggestion was then pop­ul­ar­ized in Paul J. Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” Nature 415 (2002), 23.

Chapter 3: Engagement across Distance and Engagement across Time 1. John Donne, “Meditations upon Our ­Human Condition, XVII,” in Devotions on Emergent Occasions, and Several Steps in my Sickness, 2nd ed. (London: Thomas Jones, 1624), 394–395. 2. Peter U. Clark et al., “Consequences of Twenty-­First-­Century Policy for Multi-­ Millenial Climate and Sea-­Level Change,” Nature Climate Change 6 (2016), 360–369, at 360–361, doi:10.1038/nclimate2923, quoted in Andreas Malm, The Pro­gress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World (London: Verso, 2018), 7, who exaggerates only slightly: “An eternity is determined now.”

NOTES TO C h a p te r 3 153

3. T. E. Lovejoy and C. Nobre, “Amazon Tipping Point: Last Chance for Action,” Science Advances 5 (2019), eaba2949, https://­advances​.­sciencemag​.­org​/­content​/­5/​ ­12​ /­eaba2949. 4. I have given reasons for thinking that they do in Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy, 40th anniv. ed. (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2020), chapter 1. 5. Samuel Scheffler, “Individual Responsibility in a Global Age” (1995), reprinted in Bound­aries and Allegiances: Prob­lems of Justice and Responsibility in Liberal Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 32–47, at 39. He also notes a third assumption that I leave aside ­here. 6. Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth ­Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014); Sam White, A Cold Welcome: The L ­ ittle Ice Age and Eu­rope’s Encounter with North Amer­i­ca (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); and Philipp Blom, Nature’s Mutiny: How the L ­ ittle Ice Age Transformed the West and ­Shaped the Pre­sent (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019). 7. See Elizabeth Ashford, “The Duties Imposed by the H ­ uman Right to Basic Necessities,” in Freedom from Poverty as a ­Human Right: Who Owes What to the Very Poor?, ed. Thomas Pogge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 183–218, at 194– 200; and Judith Lichtenberg, Distant Strangers: Ethics, Psy­chol­ogy, and Global Poverty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 73–96. 8. For a potentially even deeper connection to self-­interest, see the final paragraphs of this chapter. 9. Karen Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Rus­sia? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014); and Rachel Maddow, Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Rus­sia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth (New York: Crown, 2019). 10. See Robert J. Brulle, “The Climate Lobby: A Sectoral Analy­sis of Lobbying Spending on Climate Change in the USA, 2000–2016,” Climatic Change 149 (2018), 289–303, doi:10.1007/s10584-018-2241-­z; Big Oil’s Real Agenda on Climate Change: How the Oil Majors Have Spent $1bn since Paris on Narrative Capture and Lobbying on Climate, Influence Map, March 2019; Update Briefing, October 2019, https://­ influencemap​.­org​/­report​/­How​-­Big​-­Oil​-­Continues​-­to​-­Oppose​-­the​-­Paris​-­Agreement​ -­38212275958aa21196dae3b76220bddc; and for a list of senators and members of Congress who are recipients of oil industry donations (with the amounts of the donations) and who urged special additional financial breaks for oil companies during the coronavirus pandemic, see Chris D’Angelo, “Lawmakers Pushing Big Financial Break for Oil Got $35 Million in Industry Donations,” Huff Post, 24 March 2020, updated 3 April 2020, https://­www​.­huffingtonpost​.­co​.­uk​/­entry​/­lawmakers​-­request​-­trump​-­cut​ -­oil​-­gas​-­subsidies​_­n​_­5e7a6eefc5b6e051e8dcd458​?­ri18n​=­true; Mary Papenfuss, “Ted Cruz Got $35 Million for Billionaire Fracking Donors in Last Covid-19 Aid: Report,” HuffPost, 29 December 2020, updated 31 December 2020, https://­www​.­huffingtonpost​ .­co​.­uk​/­entry​/­wilks​-­fracking​-­donors​-­ted​-­cruz​-­35​-­million​-­loan​-­coronavirus​-­relief​_­n​ _­5fea86eec5b64e442105c571​?­ri18n​=­true; and Bailout Watch at https://­bailoutwatch​ .­org​/­.

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11. For example, L. J. Sonter et al., “Renewable Energy Production ­Will Exacerbate Mining Threats to Biodiversity,” Nature Communications 11 (2020), doi/10.1038/ s41467-020-17928-5. 12. See, for example, Jason Gutierrez, “ ‘Within Seconds Every­thing Was Gone’: Devastating Floods Submerge the Philippines,” New York Times, 18 November 2020 (Typhoon Vamco); and Michael T. Klare, All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019), 40–48. 13. Philippe Ciais et al., “Carbon and Other Biogeochemical Cycles,” in Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis, ed. Thomas F. Stocker et al., Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 465–570, at 472–473. 14. David J. Frame, Adrian H. Macey, and Myles R. Allen, “Cumulative Emissions and Climate Policy,” Nature Geoscience 7 (2014), 692–693, doi:10.1038/ngeo2254; and Luke Sussams, Carbon Bud­gets Explained (blog), Carbon Tracker Initiative, 6 February 2018, https://­www​.­carbontracker​.­org​/­carbon​-­budgets​-­explained​/­. 15. See globalwarmingindex​.­org, accessed 5 January 2021, https://­globalw ​ arming​ index​.­org. 16. Sivan Kartha and Paul Baer, Zero Carbon Zero Poverty the Climate Justice Way: Achieving an Equitable Phase-­Out of Carbon Emissions by 2050 while Protecting ­Human Rights, Report 1 2015 V1 Feb (Dublin: Mary Robinson Foundation—­Climate Justice, 2015), https://­www​.­mrfcj​.­org​/­pdf​/­2015​-­02​-­05​-­Zero​-­Carbon​-­Zero​-­Poverty​ -­the​-­Climate​-­Justice​-­Way​.­pdf. 17. Benjamin Franta, “Early Oil Industry Knowledge of CO2 and Global Warming,” Nature Climate Change 8 (2018), 1024–1026, doi:10.1038/s41558-018-0349-9; Neela Banerjee, “Exxon’s Oil Industry Peers Knew about Climate Dangers in the 1970s Too,” Inside Climate News, 22 December 2015, https://­insideclimatenews.​ ­org​/­news​ /­22122015​/­exxon​-­mobil​-­o il​-­industry​-­peers​-­k new​-­about​-­climate​-­change​-­dangers​ -­1970s​-­american​-­petroleum​-­institute​-­api​-­shell​-­chevron​-­texaco; and David Hasemyer and John H. Cushman Jr., “Exxon Sowed Doubt about Climate Science for De­cades by Stressing Uncertainty,” Inside Climate News, 22 October 2015. Also see chapter 5, notes 31 and 33. 18. Sivan Kartha et al., “Whose Carbon Is Burnable? Equity Considerations in the Allocation of a ‘Right to Extract,’ ” Climatic Change 150 (2018; corrected 2019), 117–129, doi:10.1007/s10584-018-2209-­z. Also see Greg Muttitt and Sivan Kartha, “Equity, Climate Justice and Fossil Fuel Extraction: Princi­ples for a Managed Phase Out,” Climate Policy 20 (2020), doi:10.1080/14693062.2020.1763900. 19. The argument that supply-­side mea­sures are essential is made in SEI (Stockholm Environment Institute) et al., The Production Gap: The Discrepancy between Countries’ Planned Fossil Fuel Production and Global Production Levels Consistent with Limiting Warming to 1.5°C or 2°C (2019), http://­productiongap​.­org​/­. 20. David Coady et al., “Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies Remain Large: An Update Based on Country-­Level Estimates” (IMF Working Paper 19/89, 2019), https://­www​ .­imf​.­org​/­en​/­Publications​/­W P​/­Issues​/­2019​/­05​/­02​/­Global​-­Fossil​-­Fuel​-­Subsidies​

NOTES TO C h a p te r 3 155

-­Remain​-­Large​-­An​-­Update​-­Based​-­on​-­Country​-­Level​-­Estimates​-­46509. Besides direct subsidies, the IMF includes the costs of environmental and health damage caused by fossil fuels but externalized. 21. Elizabeth Bast et al., The Fossil Fuel Bailout: G20 Subsidies for Oil, Gas and Coal Exploration (London: Overseas Development Institute; and Washington: OilChange International, 2014). 22. On air pollution, see Karn Vohra et al., “Global Mortality from Outdoor Fine Particle Pollution Generated by Fossil Fuel Combustion: Results from GEOS-­Chem,” Environmental Research 195 (2021), doi:10.1016/j.envres.2021.110754. On fracking pollution, see United States Environmental Protection Agency, Hydraulic Fracturing for Oil and Gas: Impacts from the Hydraulic Fracturing W ­ ater Cycle on Drinking W ­ ater Resources in the United States (Final Report), EPA-600-­R-16–236F (Washington, DC, 2016), https://­cfpub​.­epa​.­gov​/­ncea​/­hfstudy​/­recordisplay​.­cfm​?­deid​=­332990; Andrew J. Kondash, Nancy E. Lauer, and Avner Vengosh, “The Intensification of the ­Water Footprint of Hydraulic Fracturing,” Science Advances 4 (2018), eaar5982, 1–8, doi:10.1126/ sciadv.aar5982; Maddow, Blowout, 144–151. 23. Naomi Klein, This Changes Every­thing: Capitalism vs. the Climate (London: Allen Lane, 2014), 305. Klein continues, “In an often cited statistic, an Exxon Valdez-­ worth of oil has spilled in the Delta e­ very year for about fifty years” (305). Ken Saro-­ Wiwa, who was hanged by the military regime of Sani Abacha, had said, “They are ­going to arrest us all and execute us. All for Shell” (307). Also see Mike Corder, “Dutch Court ­Orders Shell Nigeria to Compensate Farmers,” AP, 29 January 2021; and Jane Croft, Anjli Raval, and Neil Munshi, “Shell Can Be Sued in London over Alleged Nigerian Pollution,” Financial Times, 12 February 2021. 24. Nnimmo Bassey, To Cook a Continent: Destructive Extraction and the Climate Crisis in Africa (Wantage, Oxon. and Nairobi: Fahamu, 2012), 164–165; Nnimmo Bassey, We Thought It Was Oil, but It Was Blood (2002; Ibadan: Kraft Books, Ltd., 2008); and Neil Munshi, “Graft and Mismanagement Claims Taint Nigeria Oil Clean­Up,” Financial Times, 29 December 2019. 25. See Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires ­behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Doubleday, 2016); and additional sources discussed in chapter 5. 26. Imaginative suggestions are available in Paul Hawken, ed., Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming (London: Penguin Random House, 2017); and Mike Berners-­Lee, ­There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Also see ­Reuters Staff, “IEA Says Climate Change Goals Hinge on Developing World Transition,” ­Reuters, 27 January 2021. 27. That a corporation is not serious about tackling climate change is demonstrated when the financial rewards for its top executives provide incentives for greater production. See Mike Coffin and Andrew Grant, “Fanning the Flames: How Executives Continue to Be Rewarded to Produce More Oil and Gas at Odds with the Energy Transition,” Carbon Tracker Initiative, 13 March 2020, https://­carbontracker​.­org​ /­reports​/­fanning​-­the​-­flames​/­. See also Kira Taylor, “ ‘Gas Is over,’ EU Bank Chief

156 NOTES TO C h a p te r 3

Says,” EURACTIV​.­com, 21 January 2021, https://­www​.­euractiv​.­com​/­section​/­energy​ -­environment​/­news​/­gas​-­is​-­over​-­eu​-­bank​-­chief​-­says​/­. 28. See International Energy Agency (IEA), World Energy Outlook 2020: Executive Summary, accessed 4 April 2021, https://­www​.­iea​.­org​/­reports​/­world​-­energy​ -­outlook​-­2020#executive​-­summary. Also see Kingsmill Bond, 2020 Vision: Why You Should See Peak Fossil Fuels Coming, Carbon Tracker Initiative, 10 September 2018, https://­carbontracker​.­org​/­reports​/­2020​-­vision​-­why​-­you​-­should​-­see​-­the​-­fossil​-­fuel​ -­peak-​ ­coming/​ ­; Tim Buckley, “IEEFA Pre­sen­ta­tion: China, Germany, South Australia, and California Are Leaders in Embracing the Global Renewable Energy Transition,” Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analy­sis (IEEFA), 19 February 2020), https://­ieefa​.­org​/­china​-­germany​-­south​-­australia​-­and​-­california​-­leaders​-­in​-­embracing​ -­global​-­renewable​-­energy​-­transition-​ ­watch​/­; and Tim Buckley, “Renewable Energy Could Leave USD20 Trillion of Fossil Fuel Assets Stranded within 30 Years,” IEEFA, 5 March 2020, https://­ieefa​.­org​/­ieefa​-­update​-­renewable​-­energy​-­could​-­leave​-­usd20​ -­trillion​-­of​-­fossil​-­fuel​-­assets​-­stranded​-­within​-­30​-­years​/­. 29. Matt Gray and Sriya Sundaresan, How to Waste over Half a Trillion Dollars: The Economic Implications of Deflationary Renewable Energy for Coal Power Investments, Carbon Tracker Initiative, 12 March 2020, https://­carbontracker​.­org​/­reports​/­how​-­to​ -­waste​-­over​-­half​-­a​-­trillion​-­dollars​/­. 30. See Appendix on In­equality. 31. Danny Cullenward and David G. Victor, Making Climate Policy Work (Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2021), 9: “Relying on markets to redirect t­ hose po­liti­cal forces takes a hard prob­lem and makes it even harder to solve.” 32. I would count effective forms of carbon capture and storage (CCS), if they ­were ever developed at scale, as alternative energy: if energy is provided without allowing CO2 to escape into the atmosphere, that counts as alternative energy. CCS so far remains undeveloped ­because the fossil-­fuel companies have refused to invest any significant portion of their vast income into making the products they sell less polluting and harmful. If they somehow became willing to invest seriously in CCS, they might be able to rescue the now-­threatened value of their reserves, which other­wise are liable to become stranded as ­people cease to be willing to tolerate the damage their technologically avoidable emissions do to the only planet we have. For why CCS would be necessary, see James Leaton et al., Unburnable Carbon 2013: Wasted Capital and Stranded Assets, Carbon Tracker Initiative and Grantham Research Institute, 2013, http://­www​.­carbontracker​.­org​/­wp​-­content​/­uploads​/­2014​/­09​/­Unburnable​-­Carbon​ -­2​-­Web​-­Version​.­pdf. 33. Tim Buckley, “Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s New ‘One Sun One World One Grid’ Vision Positive,” IEEFA Weekly Dispatch, 12 June 2020, https://­ieefa​.­org​ /­ieefa​-­india​-­prime​-­minister​-­narendra​-­modis​-­new​-­one​-­sun​-­one​-­world​-­one​-­grid​-­vision​ -­positive​/­. 34. Buckley, “Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Vision.” 35. Shue, Basic Rights, 13–64. 36. China has built more solar and wind power than any other country, but it is also burning more coal, by far, than any other country. On the w ­ hole, it is making

NOTES TO C h a p te r 3 157

climate change much worse. Adding solar and wind on top of fossil-­fuel combustion does nothing at all to slow climate change. The solar and wind must replace the fossil fuel if the carbon emissions are to be reduced. See Leslie Hook, “Climate Change: How China Moved from Leader to Laggard,” Financial Times, 25 November 2019; and United Nations Environment Programme, Emissions Gap Report 2020 (Nairobi: UNEP, 2020), https://­www​.­unep​.­org​/­emissions​-­gap​-­report​-­2020. 37. Mengpin Ge, Johannes Friedrich, and Thomas Damassa, “6 Graphs Explain the World’s Top 10 Emitters,” Climate Insights Blog, World Resources Institute, 25 November 2014, http://­www​.­wri​.­org​/­blog​/­2014​/­11​/­6​-­graphs​-­explain​-­world%E2%80%99s​ -­top​-­10​-­emitters; Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser, “CO2 and Green­house Gas Emissions,” Our World in Data, accessed 4 April 2021, https://­ourworldindata​.­org​/­co2​ -­and​-­other​-­greenhouse​-­gas​-­emissions. Specific country totals are at “Cumulative CO2 Emissions,” Our World in Data, accessed 4 April 2021, https://­ourworldindata​.­org​ /­grapher​/­cumulative​-­co​-­emissions​?­tab​=­chart&country​=­OWID​_­W RL; and “CAIT Climate Data Explorer,” World Resources Institute, accessed 4 April 2021, https://­cait​ .­wri​.­org​/­historical​/­Country%20GHG%20Emissions#. 38. Henry Shue, “The Unavoidability of Justice” (1992), reprinted in Shue, Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 27–46. 39. I explore what this means given the possibility of technologies of carbon ­dioxide removal in chapter 4. 40. Tim Carlsen et al., “Guest Post: How Declining Ice in Clouds Makes High ‘Climate Sensitivity’ Plausible,” Carbon Brief, 30 October 2020, https://­www​.­carbonbrief​ .­o rg​ /­g uest​ -­p ost​ -­h ow​ -­d eclining​ -­i ce​ -­i n​ -­c louds​ -­m akes​ -­h igh​ -­c limate​ -­s ensitivity​ -­plausible; Timothy M. Lenton et al., “Climate Tipping Points—­Too Risky to Bet Against,” Nature 575 (2019; corrected 2020), 592–595, at 595, doi:10.1038/d41586019-03595-0; and ­Will Steffen et al., “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene,” Proceedings of the National Acad­emy of Sciences of the United States of Amer­i­ca 115 (2018), 8252–8259, doi:10.1073/pnas.1810141115. 41. R. T. Pierrehumbert, “Cumulative Carbon and Just Allocation of the Global Carbon Commons,” Chicago Journal of International Law 13 (2013), 527–548; Matthew Collins et al., “Long-­Term Climate Change: Projections, Commitments and Irreversibility,” in Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis, ed. Thomas F. Stocker et al., Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1029–1136; and Frame, Macey, and Allen, “Cumulative Emissions and Climate Policy.” 42. China’s Ministry of Environment and Ecol­ogy is making some effort to discourage Chinese banks from providing the financing for polluting BRI proj­ects; see Christian Shepherd, “­Belt and Road Pollution Blacklist Discourages Fossil Fuel Investments,” Financial Times, 1 December 2020. 43. Similar international schemes are being proposed in Australia and China; see Odysseus Patrick, “The $16 Billion Plan to Beam Australia’s Outback Sun onto Asia’s Power Grids,” Washington Post, 10 August 2020; and James Kynge and Lucy Hornby, “China Eyes Role as World’s Power Supplier,” Financial Times, 7 June 2018.

158 NOTES TO C h a p te r 3

44. Elizabeth Cripps, “Population and Environment: The Impossible, the Impermissible, and the Imperative,” in The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics, ed. Stephen M. Gardiner and Allen Thompson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 380–390. 45. I originally called the exploitation of vulnerabilities that one has contributed to creating “compound injustice” in Shue, “Unavoidability of Justice,” 36–41. 46. Bryan Denton and Somini Sengupta, “India’s Ominous F ­ uture: Too L ­ ittle ­Water, or Far Too Much,” New York Times, 25 November 2019. 47. Henry Shue, “Subsistence Emissions and Luxury Emissions” (1993), reprinted in Shue, Climate Justice, 47–67, at 52–53. 48. Matthew 27:24 (Revised Standard Version). 49. Tim Buckley and Charles Worringham, “India’s Electricity Sector Transformation Has Made Pro­gress in 2019/20,” IEEFA India, 28 November 2019, https://­ieefa​ .­org​/­ieefa​-­india​-­indias​-­electricity​-­sector​-­transformation​-­has​-­made​-­progress​-­in​-­2019​ -­20​/­. “Investors continue to pivot away from Indian thermal power generation due to renewable energy being the lowest cost source of new power generation, and the ongoing shortages in cost-­effective fossil fuels continuing.” 50. Shue, Basic Rights, 119–127. 51. Darrel Moellendorf, The Moral Challenge of Dangerous Climate Change: Values, Poverty, and Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 22. 52. Practical Action, Poor ­People’s Energy Outlook 2013: Energy for Community Ser­vices (Rugby, UK: Practical Action Publishing Ltd., 2013), x. On Africa’s need for investment to avoid carbon lock in, see Kim Harrisberg, “Africa’s Leap to Clean Energy Seen Needing Policy Change, Investment,” ­Reuters, 11 January 2021, and the under­ lying study reported on. 53. Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: Encyclical Letter of the Holy F ­ ather Francis on Care for Our Common Home (2015), para. 162, 120, http://­w2​.­vatican​.­va​/­content​/­francesco​ /­en​/­encyclicals​/­documents​/­papa​-­francesco​_­20150524​_­enciclica​-­laudato​-­si​.­html. An ­earlier paragraph had observed, “Intergenerational solidarity is not optional, but rather a basic question of justice, since the world we have received also belongs to t­ hose who ­will follow us” (para. 159, 118). 54. Henry Shue, “Deadly Delays, Saving Opportunities: Creating a More Dangerous World?” (2010), reprinted in Shue, Climate Justice, 263–286; and Lauren Hartzell-­ Nichols, A Climate of Risk: Precautionary Princi­ples, Catastrophes, and Climate Change (New York: Routledge, 2017), 44–82. 55. See discussion in chapter 1, note 26. 56. Lenton et al., “Climate Tipping Points,” 595. 57. Thomas Sumner, “No Stopping the Collapse of West Antarctic Ice Sheet,” Science 344 (2014), 683; Ian Joughin, Benjamin E. Smith, and Brooke Medley, “Marine Ice Sheet Collapse Potentially ­Under Way for the Thwaites Glacier Basin, West Antarctica,” Science 344 (2014), 735–738, doi:10.1126/science.1249055; and E. Rignot et al., “Widespread, Rapid Grounding Line Retreat of Pine Island, Thwaites, Smith, and Kohler Glaciers, West Antarctica, from 1992 to 2011,” Geophysical Research Letters 41 (2014), 3502–3509, doi:10.1002/2014GL060140.

NOTES TO C h a p te r 3 159

58. Lovejoy and Nobre, “Amazon Tipping Point.” Also see Henry Fountain, “ ‘­Going in the Wrong Direction’: More Tropical Forest Loss in 2019,” New York Times, 2 June 2020; and Jake Spring, “Exclusive: Brazil Amazon Fires Likely Worst in 10 Years, August Data Incomplete, Government Researcher Says,” ­R euters, 2 September 2020. 59. For a graphic, interactive, highly accessible, and extensive pre­sen­ta­tion of the under­lying dynamics of AMOC, see Moises Velasquez-­Manoff and Jeremy White, “In the Atlantic Ocean, Subtle Shifts Hint at Dramatic Dangers,” New York Times, 2 March 2021, https://­www​.­nytimes​.­com​/­interactive​/­2021​/­03​/­02​/­climate​/­atlantic​ -­ocean​-­climate​-­change​.­html. For details, see L. Caesar et al., “Current Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation Weakest in Last Millenium,” Nature Geoscience 14 (2021), 118–120, doi:10.1038/s41561-021-00699-­z; and L. Caesar et al., “Observed Fingerprint of a Weakening Atlantic Ocean Overturning Circulation,” Nature 556 (2018), 191–196, doi:10.1038/s41586-018-0006-5. Also see Chris Mooney, “The Oceans’ Circulation ­Hasn’t Been This Sluggish in 1,000 Years. That’s Bad News,” Washington Post, 11 April 2018, https://­www​.­washingtonpost​.­com​/­news​/­energy​-­environment​/­wp​/­2018​ /­04​/­11​/­the​-­oceans​-­circulation​-­hasnt​-­been​-­this​-­sluggish​-­in​-­1000​-­years​-­thats​-­bad​-­news​ /­​?­utm​_­term​=­​.­3be3b0282343. 60. Henry Fountain, “Alaska’s Permafrost Is Thawing,” New York Times, 23 August 2017; and Boris K. Biskaborn et al., “Permafrost Is Warming at a Global Scale,” Nature Communications 10 (2019), doi:10.1038/s41467-018-08240-4. 61. Alexey Portnov et al., “Offshore Permafrost Decay and Massive Seabed Methane Escape in W ­ ater Depths >20m at the South Kara Sea Shelf,” Geophysical Research Letters 40 (2013), 3962–3967, doi:10.1002/grl.50735. 62. A research team led by scientists from Ohio State University believes that it has evidence that the melting of the Greenland ice is already irreversible: “We show that widespread retreat between 2000 and 2005 resulted in a step-­increase in discharge and a switch to a new dynamic state of sustained mass loss that would persist even u ­ nder a decline in surface melt”; see Michalea D. King et al., “Dynamic Ice Loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet Driven by Sustained Glacier Retreat,” Communications Earth & Environment 1 (2020), abstract, doi:10.1038/s43247-020-0001-2. 63. Scheffler, Bound­aries and Allegiances, 39. 64. Luke 10:29–37 (Revised Standard Version). 65. Toby Ord notices this but does not seem fully to appreciate its significance; see The Precipice: Existential Risk and the F ­ uture of Humanity (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020), 386n34. 66. Catriona McKinnon, Climate Change and ­Future Justice: Precaution, Compensation, and Triage (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 129. 67. Anja Karnein, “Putting Fairness in Its Place: Why ­There Is a Duty to Take Up the Slack,” Journal of Philosophy 111 (2014), 593–607. 68. Thanks, of course, to Bernard Williams. 69. I am grateful to Joshua Goldstein for raising this issue. 70. Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), part 2, “The Second Death,” 117.

160 NOTES TO C h a p te r 4

71. Samuel Scheffler, Death & the Afterlife, ed. Niko Kolodny (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 30 and 26. 72. Hannah Arendt, “Eu­rope and the Atom Bomb” (1954), reprinted in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1994), 421–422. 73. The remaining paragraphs in this chapter draw on Henry Shue, “Uncertainty as the Reason for Action: Last Opportunity and F ­ uture Climate Disaster,” in “Global Justice and Climate,” special issue, Global Justice: Theory Practice Rhe­toric 8 (2016), 86–103, https://­www​.­theglobaljusticenetwork​.­org​/­global​/­index​.­php​/­gjn​/­article​/­view​/­89​/­65. 74. I am grateful to Anja Karnein for discussion of this issue. 75. Provided of course that the actions we choose to take are not misguided or counterproductive. But we have overwhelming evidence that carbon emissions need to be phased out before the cumulative carbon bud­get for an endurable temperature is exceeded, so ­there is no danger that exiting fossil fuels rapidly is a ­mistake.

Chapter 4: Are ­There Second Chances on Climate Change? 1. Professor Katharine Hayhoe, Twitter, https://­twitter​.­com​/­KHayhoe​/­status​ /­1242817345069998080, quoted in Meehan Crist, “What the Coronavirus Means for Climate Change,” New York Times, 27 March 2020. 2. Professor Cristian Proistosescu, Twitter, https://­t witter​.­com​/­cristiproist​ /­status​/­1304211038980759553, quoted in John Branch and Brad Plumer, “Climate Disruption Is Now Locked In. The Next Moves W ­ ill Be Crucial,” New York Times, 22 September 2020. 3. Ada Limón, “Salvage,” Greenpeace, February 2020, https://­www​.­greenpeace​ .­org​/­usa​/­stories​/­ada​-­limon​-­on​-­our​-­climate​-­in​-­crisis, quoted in Michaela Coplen et al., “Theme Section Introduction,” St Antony’s International Review 15 (2020), 3–7, at 3. 4. Henry Shue, “Climate Dreaming: Negative Emissions, Risk Transfer, and Irreversibility,” Journal of H ­ uman Rights and Environment 8 (2017), 203–216, doi:10.4337/ jhre.2017.02.02. 5. Dominic Lenzi, “The Ethics of Negative Emissions,” Global Sustainability 1 (2018), 1–8, doi:10.1017/sus.2018.5; and “On the Permissibility (or Other­wise) of Negative Emissions,” Ethics, Policy & Environment (2021), published online 5 February 2021, doi:10.1080/21550085.2021.1885249. 6. Jan C. Minx et al., “Negative Emissions—­Part 1: Research Landscape and Synthesis,” Environmental Research Letters 13 (2018), 063001, doi:10.1088/1748–9326/ aabf9h. 7. Nathaniel Rich argues that the best opportunity to prevent the worst arose in the previous de­cade but was similarly wasted through corporate deception and po­liti­cal irresponsibility; see Losing Earth: The De­cade We Could Have ­Stopped Climate Change (New York: Picador, 2019). 8. David Wallace-­Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the ­Future (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2019), 4.

NOTES TO C h a p te r 4 161

9. Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser, “CO2 and Green­house Gas Emissions,” Our World in Data, accessed 4 April 2021, https://­ourworldindata​.­org​/­co2​-­and​-­other​ -­greenhouse​-­gas​-­emissions. ­These specific totals ­were retrieved at “Per Capita CO2 Emissions, 2019,” Our World in Data, accessed 4 April 2021, https://­ourworldindata​ .­org​/­grapher​/­cumulative​-­co​-­emissions​?­tab​=c­ hart&country​=O ­ WID. Cumulative emissions from the United States ­rose from 256.95 billion tonnes in 1992 to 399.38 billion tonnes in 2017, while cumulative emissions from China r­ ose from 47.00 billion to 200.14. Thus, cumulative Chinese emissions in 2017 ­were lower than cumulative US emissions in 1992 and only slightly more than half US emissions in 2017, for a vastly larger population. ­These figures are exclusively for emissions from fossil fuels and cement and omit emissions from agriculture, forestry, and other land-­use changes, which add significantly to the complete total. 10. Elizabeth Kolbert, “What ­Will Another De­cade of Climate Crisis Bring?,” New Yorker, 13 January 2020, https://­www​.­newyorker​.­com​/­magazine​/­2020​/­01​/­13​/­what​ -­will​-­another​-­decade​-­of​-­climate​-­crisis​-­bring. 11. Timothy Mitchell, “Afterword to the Paperback Edition,” in Carbon Democracy: Po­liti­cal Power in the Age of Oil (New York: Verso, 2013), 260. 12. Dieter Helm, Net Zero: How We Stop Causing Climate Change (London: William Collins, 2020), 1. 13. Chris Mooney, “Scientists Descended into Greenland’s Perilous Ice Caverns—­ and Came Back with a Worrying Message,” Washington Post, 23 December 2020. 14. SEI (Stockholm Environment Institute) et al., The Production Gap: The Discrepancy between Countries’ Planned Fossil Fuel Production and Global Production Levels Consistent with Limiting Warming to 1.5°C or 2°C (2019), 8, http://­productiongap.​ ­org/​ ­. 15. G. P. Peters et al., “Carbon Dioxide Emissions Continue to Grow amidst Slowly Emerging Climate Policies,” Nature Climate Change 10 (2020), 3–6, doi:10.1038/ s41558-019-0659-6. See especially figure 2. 16. See chapter 5, notes 9 and 10. This social phenomenon is somewhat similar to the kinds of recalcitrant “rebound” phenomena clearly described in Mike Berners-­Lee and Duncan Clark, The Burning Question: We C ­ an’t Burn Half the World’s Oil, Coal and Gas. So How Do We Quit? (London: Profile Books, 2013), 47–63. 17. Christiana Figueres et al., “Three Years to Safeguard Our Climate,” Nature 546 (2017), 593–595. 18. Christian Holz, Sivan Kartha, and Tom Athanasiou, “Fairly Sharing 1.5: National Fair Shares of a 1.5°C-­Compliant Global Mitigation Effort,” International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics 18 (2018), 117–134, at 131, doi:10.1007/ s10784-017-9371-­z. 19. Pete Smith et al., “Biophysical and Economic Limits to Negative CO2 Emissions,” Nature Climate Change 6 (2016), 42–50, at 43, doi:10.1038/nclimate2870. The notation “CO2eq” indicates the incorporation of the effects of GHGs other than CO2 as the amount of CO2 that would produce that same effect—­the equivalent amount of CO2, or CO2eq. 20. Myles Allen et al., “Summary for Policymakers,” in Global Warming of 1.5 °C, ed. Valérie Masson-­Delmotte et al., Special Report (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018), C.3, 17, https://­www​.­ipcc​.­ch​/­sr15​/­chapter​/­spm​/­.

162 NOTES TO C h a p te r 4

21. I am grateful to Catriona McKinnon for rescuing me from even clumsier labels. 22. See the discussion in chapter 5. 23. Alex Lenferna, “Divest-­Invest: A Moral Case for Fossil Fuel Divestment,” in Climate Justice: Integrating Economics and Philosophy, ed. Ravi Kanbur and Henry Shue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 139–156. 24. Kejun Jiang et al., “Mitigation Pathways Compatible with 1.5°C in the Context of Sustainable Development,” in Masson-­Delmotte et al., Global Warming of 1.5 °C, 2.3.4.1, 122. In the caption for figure 2.9, the first and second purposes are labeled “compensatory CO2” and “net negative CO2”; the first label seems confusing to me. 25. The impor­tant argument that failure to carry out ambitious mitigation now increases a nation’s responsibility to conduct compensating remedial CDR ­later is made, for the first time of which I am aware, in Claire L. Fyson et al., “Fair-­Share Carbon Dioxide Removal Increases Major Emitter Responsibility,” Nature Climate Change 10 (2020), 836–841, doi:10.1038/s41558-020-0857-2. 26. Kevin Anderson and Glen Peters, “The Trou­ble with Negative Emissions,” Science 354 (2016), 182–183, doi:10.1126/science.aah4567; Oliver Geden and Andreas Löschel, “Define Limits for Temperature Overshoot Targets,” Nature Geoscience 10 (2017), 881–882, doi:10.1038/s41561-017-0026-­z; and Oliver Geden, “Po­liti­ cally Informed Advice for Climate Action,” Nature Geoscience 11 (2018), 380–383, doi:10.1038/s41561-018-0143-3. 27. Edward A. Parson and Holly J. Buck, “Large-­Scale Carbon Dioxide Removal: The Prob­lem of Phasedown,” Global Environmental Politics 20 (2020), 70–92, at 71. 28. For further complications, see Parson and Buck, “Large-­Scale Carbon Dioxide Removal.” 29. Minx et al., “Negative Emissions—­Part 1,” abstract and 17–18. 30. Jiang et al., “Mitigation Pathways Compatible,” 2.3.4, 121. See also Brad Plumer and Christopher Flavelle, “Businesses Aim to Pull Green­house Gases from the Air. It’s a ­Gamble,” New York Times, 18 January 2021. 31. A delightful and highly accessible account of all this is in Tyler Volk, CO2 Rising: The World’s Greatest Environmental Challenge (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). ­Every earthling—­and especially beer-­drinkers—­should read this ­little paperback. 32. See the searchable database at “Explore the Data,” Forests & Finance, https://­ forestsandfinance​.­org​/­data​/­. 33. Jiang et al., “Mitigation Pathways Compatible,” 2.3.4; 2.3.4.1; 2.3.4.2; and Heleen de Conick et al., “Strengthening and Implementing the Global Response,” in Global Warming of 1.5 °C, ed. Valérie Masson-­Delmotte et al., Special Report (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018), 4.3.7. 34. Melissa Chan and Heriberto Araújo, “China Wants Food. Brazil Pays the Price,” The Atlantic, 15 February 2020. 35. Smith et al., “Biophysical and Economic Limits to Negative CO2 Emissions,” 47 and 46. 36. Rob Bellamy and Oliver Geden, “Govern CO2 Removal from the Ground Up,” Nature Geoscience 12 (2019), 874–879, at 874.

NOTES TO C h a p te r 4 163

37. I did not take this into account in “Climate Dreaming,” as observed in Minx et al., “Negative Emissions—­Part I,” 19. 38. Minx et al., “Negative Emissions—­Part 1,” abstract and 13; Jiang et al., “Mitigation Pathways Compatible,” 2.3.4.1, 122. 39. Bellamy and Geden, “Govern CO2 Removal from the Ground Up.” 40. I w ­ ill simply mention a few concerns. B ­ ecause SRM could affect the ­people of e­ very nation on the planet, it o ­ ught to be employed only a­ fter an international consensus has been reached on a system of global governance for its implementation and maintenance, not imposed on every­one ­else by the wealthiest and most technologically advanced nations pursuing their own national interests. SRM does nothing to change the mechanisms that are causing climate change but instead blocks (only?) the step of temperature rise late in the pro­cess by—if it works as hoped—­blocking the right amount of incoming solar radiation; in this re­spect it deals with only the harmful symptoms, but not the under­lying disruption to climate dynamics. It does nothing to reduce the acidification of the oceans or the rampant lung and heart disease that currently result from the air pollution from the combustion of fossil fuel. And it would nevertheless strongly tempt fossil-­fuel interests to continue to resist a transition away from the current energy regime and to continue business-­as-­usual. Most impor­tant at pre­sent, while m ­ atters are urgent, they are not desperate. Sophisticated modeling shows multiple pathways by which net zero emissions can be reached in time if we can retire the politicians who are currently blocking for the fossil-­fuel industry. For three examples for the United States, see National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Accelerating Decarbonization of the U.S. Energy System (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2021), doi:10.17226/25932; James H. Williams et al., “Carbon-­Neutral Pathways for the United States,” AGU Advances 2 (2021), doi:10.1029/2020AV000284; and Eric Larson et al., Net-­Zero Amer­i­ca: Potential Pathways, Infrastructure, and Impacts, interim report, 15 December 2020 (v2) (Prince­ ton, NJ: Andlinger Center, Prince­ton University), https://­netzeroamerica​.­princeton​ .­edu​/­the​-­report. 41. A third thesis that I believe is a natu­ral extension of (2) has already been introduced in chapter 1 and supported in­de­pen­dently ­there and in chapter 3: (3) most pointedly, mitigation that is so lacking in ambition that it bequeaths risks that remain unlimited, when the risks could without inordinate sacrifice have been at least ­limited, is intolerably objectionable (and snatches defeat from the jaws of a g­ rand historic opportunity to bring climate change ­under control). 42. Héiène Hermansson and Sven Ove Hansson, “A Three-­Party Model Tool for Ethical Risk Analy­sis,” Risk Management 9 (2007), 129–144, at 131. 43. Jonathan Wolff, “Five Types of Risky Situation,” Law, Innovation and Technology 2 (2010), 151–163, at 159. 44. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 134; [1st ed. (1971), 154–155]; and Stephen M. Gardiner, “A Core Precautionary Princi­ple,” Journal of Po­liti­cal Philosophy 14 (2006), 33–60. 45. Rawls, Theory of Justice, rev. ed., 134 [1st ed., 154].

164 NOTES TO C h a p te r 4

46. David A. Weisbach, “The Prob­lems with Climate Ethics,” in Stephen M. Gardiner and David A. Weisbach, Debating Climate Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 135–244, at 172. 47. The same applies among the three generations that together constitute what I am calling “the pre­sent generation”; the inaction of the grand­fathers has inflicted an unreasonable g­ amble on the grandchildren alive t­ oday. This was one basis of the “­children’s lawsuit,” Juliana vs. the United States; see Wallace-­Wells, Uninhabitable Earth, 167. 48. Personal communication, April 2019. 49. Deirdre Cooper, “Low Rates Provide a Historic Opportunity to Tackle Climate Change,” Financial Times, 26 December 2019. 50. Ian Joughin, Benjamin E. Smith, and Brooke Medley, “Marine Ice Sheet Collapse Potentially ­Under Way for the Thwaites Glacier Basin, West Antarctica,” Science 34 (2014) 4, 735–738, doi:10.1126/science.1249055; and E. Rignot et al., “Widespread, Rapid Grounding Line Retreat of Pine Island, Thwaites, Smith, and Kohler Glaciers, West Antarctica, from 1992 to 2011,” Geophysical Research Letters 41 (2014), 3502–3509, doi:10.1002/2014GL060140. 51. For a fuller but still accessible account of the mechanisms under­lying the melting, see British Antarctic Survey, “Deep Channels Link Ocean to Antarctic Glacier,” press release, 9 September 2020, https://­www​.­bas​.­ac​.­uk​/­media​-­post​/­deep​-­channels​ -­link​-­ocean​-­to​-­antarctic​-­glacier​/­. Links are provided to the peer-­reviewed technical publications summarized. 52. Yes, the glacier is sliding uphill as it approaches the sea, ­because the mountains of ice in WAIS weigh against it from ­behind. 53. Stephen Rich Rintoul et al., “Ocean Heat Drives Rapid Basal Melt of the Totten Ice Shelf,” Science Advances 2 (2016), 1–5, https://­advances​.­sciencemag​.­org​/­content​ /­2​/­12​/­e1601610. 54. More recently, warming ocean w ­ ater has been found in addition to be undercutting East Antarctica’s Denman Glacier by penetrating the deepest continental gorge on earth, which happens to lie beneath Denman; see V. Brancato et al., “Grounding Line Retreat of Denman Glacier, East Antarctica, Mea­sured with COSMO-­ SkyMed Radar Interferometry Data,” Geophysical Research Letters 47 (2020), 1–10, doi:10.1029/2019GL086291. For an account accessible to laypersons, see Chris Mooney, “Scientists Just Discovered a Massive New Vulnerability in the Antarctic Ice Sheet,” Washington Post, 23 March 2020. Denman consists of ­water equivalent to a global sea-­level rise of 1.5 m and appears to be in rapid retreat. 55. Annette Baier, “Poisoning the Wells,” in Values at Risk, ed. Douglas MacLean, Mary­land Studies in Public Philosophy (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1986), 49. 56. See chapter 1 and, for example, Gregory S. Cooper, Simon Willcock, and John A. Dearing, “Regime Shifts Occur Disproportionately Faster in Larger Ecosystems,” Nature Communications 11 (2020), 1–10, doi:10.1038/s41467-020-15029-­x. They conclude, “The collapse of large vulnerable ecosystems, such as the Amazon rainforest and Ca­r ib­bean coral reefs, may take only a few de­cades once triggered” (abstract) and “humanity now needs to prepare for changes in ecosystems that are faster than

NOTES TO C h a p te r 5 165

we previously envisaged through our traditional linear view of the world, including across Earth’s largest and most iconic ecosystems, and the social-­ecological systems that they support” (7). Also see Jeff Berardelli, “Climate Tipping Points May Have Been Reached Already, Experts Say,” CBS News, 26 April 2021, https://­www​.­cbsnews​.c­ om​ /­news​/­climate​-­change​-­tipping​-­points​-­amazon​-­rainforest​-­antarctic​-­ice​-­gulf​-­stream​/­. 57. William Blake, “Milton,” Book the First, 22, ll. 24–25, in Blake: Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 505. Blake meant a dif­fer­ent level of permanence, however. 58. In tribute to Billy Kwan (played by Linda Hunt), The Year of Living Dangerously.

Chapter 5: Taking Control of Our Legacy 1. Leah Cardamore Stokes, Short Circuiting Policy: Interest Groups and the ­Battle over Clean Energy and Climate Policy in the American States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 4, 5, and 34. 2. Timothy Mitchell, “Afterward to the Paperback Edition,” in Carbon Democracy: Po­liti­cal Power in the Age of Oil (New York: Verso, 2013), 267. 3. Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias (New York and London: Verso, 2010), 294. 4. Henry Shue, “Responsible for What? Carbon Producer CO2 Contributions and the Energy Transition,” Climatic Change 144 (2017), 591–596, doi:10.1007/ s10584-017-2042-9. 5. For documentation, see chapter 3, notes 10 and 17, and chapter 5, notes 31 and 33. 6. See, for example, Mitchell, Carbon Democracy; Leif Wenar, Blood Oil: Tyrants, Vio­lence, and the Rules That Run the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Matto Mildenberger, Carbon Captured: How Business and ­Labor Control Climate Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020); and Stokes, Short Circuiting Policy. 7. For amazingly detailed practical guidance, see Tara Shine, How to Save Your Planet One Object at a Time (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020). Also see Mike Berners-­Lee, ­There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); and Paul Hawken, ed., Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming (London: Penguin Random House, 2017). 8. At a more general level, I may be presupposing something like what Elizabeth Cripps calls “promotional duties”—­“duties to attempt to bring about the necessary collective action”—­for which she provides sophisticated and systematic argument; see her Climate Change and the Moral Agent: Individual Duties in an Interdependent World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 140–150, at 140. Also see the taxonomy of responses in Simon Caney, “Climate Change and Non-­Ideal Theory: Six Ways of Responding to Non-­Compliance,” in Climate Justice in a Non-­Ideal World, ed. Clare Heyward and Dominic Roser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 21–42. 9. G. P. Peters et al., “Carbon Dioxide Emissions Continue to Grow amidst Slowly Emerging Climate Policies,” Nature Climate Change 10 (2020), 3–6, doi:10.1038/ s41558-019-0659-6; see especially figure 2. Also see R. B. Jackson, Corinne Le Quéré,

166 NOTES TO C h a p te r 5

and R. M. Andrew, “Global Energy Growth Is Outpacing Decarbonization,” Environmental Research Letters 13 (2018), doi:10.1088/1748–9326/aaf303. 10. David Wallace-­Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the ­Future (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2019), 177. 11. For a report on GHG that includes t­ hose from the manufacture of plastics and other chemical pro­cesses, see Environmental Integrity Proj­ect, Green­ house Gases from Oil, Gas, and Petrochemical Production, 8 January 2020, https://­ www​.­e nvironmentalintegrity​.­o rg​ /­r eports​ /­g reenhouse​ -­gases​ -­f rom​ -­o il​ -­gas​ -­a nd​ -­petrochemical​-­production​/­. 12. James Bruggers, “Market Headwinds Buffet Appalachia’s F ­ uture as a Center for Petrochemicals,” Inside Climate News, 21 March 2020, https://­insideclimatenews​ .­org​/­news​/­21032020​/­appalachia​-­future​-­center​-­petrochemicals​-­coronavirus​-­plastic​ -­ethane​/­. 13. Laura ­Sullivan, “Plastic Wars: Industry Spent Millions Selling Recycling—­To Sell More Plastic,” NPR, 31 March 2020, https://­www​.­npr​.­org​/­2020​/­03​/­31​/­822597631​ /­plastic​-­wars​-­three​-­takeaways​-­from​-­the​-­fight​-­over​-­the​-­future​-­of​-­plastics. 14. Hiroko Tabuchi, Michael Corkery, and Carlos Mureithi, “Big Oil Is in Trou­ble. Its Plan: Flood Africa with Plastic,” New York Times, 30 August 2020. 15. Nicholas Kusnetz, “In Louisiana, Stepping onto Oil and Gas Industry Land May Soon Get You 3 Years or More in Prison,” Inside Climate News, 10 June 2020, https://­ insideclimatenews.​ ­org/​ n ­ ews/​ 1­ 0062020/​ l­ ouisiana-​ p ­ etrochemical-​ p ­ lant-​ ­environmental​ -­justice​/­. 16. Robert Schuwerk and Greg Rogers, It’s Closing Time: The Huge Bill to Abandon Oilfields Comes Early, 18 June 2020 (London: Carbon Tracker Initiative, 2020), 11 and 36, https://­carbontracker​.­org​/­reports​/­its​-­closing​-­time​/­. 17. Hiroko Tabuchi, “Fracking Firms Fail, Rewarding Executives and Raising Climate Fears,” New York Times, 12 July 2020 (updated 17 July). Contrast Kristina Marusic, “Fractured,” Part 1: “Harmful Chemicals and Unknowns Haunt Pennsylvanians Surrounded by Fracking,” Environmental Health News, 1 March 2021, https://­www​.­ehn​ .­org​/­fractured​-­harmful​-­chemicals​-­fracking​-­2650428324​.­html. 18. Schuwerk and Rogers, Closing Time, 10. ARO for a single especially deep fracked well can cost $1 million. 19. Mya Frazier, “Gas Companies Are Abandoning Their Wells, Leaving Them to Leak Methane Forever,” Bloomberg Green, 17 September 2020, https://­www​.­bloomberg​ .­com​/­news​/­features​/­2020​-­09​-­17​/­abandoned​-­gas​-­wells​-­are​-­left​-­to​-­spew​-­methane​-­for​ -­eternity. Employment-­creating ways to tackle the results of this corporate ruthlessness are being formulated: Jason Bordoff, Daniel Raimi, and Neelesh Nerurkar, Green Stimulus for Oil and Gas Workers: Considering a Major Federal Effort to Plug Orphaned and Abandoned Wells, Resources for the ­Future and Center on Global Energy Policy, Columbia University, 20 July 2020, https://­www​.­energypolicy​.­columbia​.­edu​/­research​ /­report​/­green​-­stimulus​-­oil​-­and​-­gas​-­workers​-­considering​-­major​-­federal​-­effort​-­plug​ -­orphaned​-­and​-­abandoned. 20. The Carbon Tracker Initiative in London coined the terms “stranded assets” and “stranded liabilities,” I believe. Carbon Tracker continues to produce perceptive

NOTES TO C h a p te r 5 167

and penetrating reports on the fossil-­fuel industry, as does the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analy­sis in Cleveland. Each has valuable studies available for ­free online. 21. Kingsmill Bond, Ed Vaughan, and Harry Benham, Decline and Fall: The Size and Vulnerability of the Fossil Fuel System, Carbon Tracker Initiative, 4 June 2020, 24, https://­carbontracker​.­org​/­reports​/­decline​-­and​-­fall​/­. Also see Fiona Harvey, “State-­ Owned Fossil Fuel Firms’ Plan to Invest $1.9tn Could Destroy Climate Hopes,” Guardian, 9 February 2021: “National oil companies (NOCs) produce about two-­thirds of the world’s oil and gas and own about 90% of reserves.” 22. Bond, Vaughan, and Benham, Decline and Fall, 8. Shareholders are becoming increasingly restive—­see Attracta Mooney, “Shareholder Climate Rebellions Surge despite Coronavirus Crisis,” Financial Times, 30 May 2020. 23. Clifford Kraus, “ ‘I’m Just Living a Nightmare’: Oil Industry Braces for Devastation,” New York Times, 21 April 2020. 24. On ExxonMobil’s deep entanglements with Putin’s Rosneft, see Rachel Maddow, Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Rus­sia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth (New York: Crown, 2019), 269–289. More generally, see Karen Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Rus­sia? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014); and Steve Coll, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (New York: Penguin, 2012). 25. Charles Koch’s decision not to go public has enabled him to maintain an extreme degree of secrecy about his operations; for example, see the account given by Christopher Leonard, Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in Amer­i­ca (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019), 133–134, about Koch’s ability to get away with the destruction of internal documents sought by a federal prosecutor in the case of oil allegedly stolen from Native Americans’ wells. One of Koch’s often-­ invoked guiding princi­ples is said to be “the ­whale that comes above sea level gets harpooned” (458). Also see Mayer, Dark Money. 26. For BlackRock’s extensive support for coal-­burning utilities, see Eu­rope Beyond Coal, Fool’s Gold: The Financial Institutions Risking Our Renewable Energy ­Future with Coal, 15 July 2020, 11ff., https://­beyond​-­coal​.­eu​/­2020​/­07​/­15​/­fools​-­gold​-­2020​/­. Cf. Attracta Mooney, “BlackRock Punishes 53 Companies over Climate Inaction,” Financial Times, 14 July 2020. 27. Po­liti­cal contributions in the United States are tracked in the OpenSecrets Newsletter published by the Center for Responsive Politics, https://­www​.­opensecrets​.­org​/­. 28. David Coady et al., “Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies Remain Large: An Update Based on Country-­Level Estimates” (IMF Working Paper 19/89, 2019), https://­www​ .­imf​.­org​/­en​/­Publications​/­W P​/­Issues​/­2019​/­05​/­02​/­Global​-­Fossil​-­Fuel​-­Subsidies​ -­Remain​-­Large​-­An​-­Update​-­Based​-­on​-­Country​-­Level​-­Estimates​-­46509. Besides direct subsidies, the IMF includes the costs of environmental and health damage caused by fossil fuels but externalized. Also see Elizabeth Bast et al., Empty Promises: G20 Subsidies to Oil, Gas and Coal Production (Washington, DC: Oil Change International, 2015), http://­priceofoil​.­org​/­2015​/­11​/­11​/­empty​-­promises​-­g20​-­subsidies​-­to​-­oil​-­gas​-­and​ -­coal​-­production​/­; Alex Doukas, Talk Is Cheap: How G20 Governments Are Financing

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Climate Disaster (Washington, DC: Oil Change International, 2017), http://­priceofoil​ .­org​/­content​/­uploads​/­2017​/­07​/­talk​_­is​_­cheap​_­G20​_­report​_­July2017​.­pdf; and Global Gas and Oil Network, Oil, Gas and the Climate: An Analy­sis of Oil and Gas Industry Plans for Expansion and Compatibility with Global Emission Limits, 2019, www​.­ggon​.­org. And note Stokes, Short Circuiting Policy, 15: “While fossil fuel subsidies are permanent, ­these renewable energy tax credits expire.” 29. Nadja Popo­vich, Livia Albeck-­Ripka, and Kendra Pierre-­Louis, “The Trump Administration Is Reversing 100 Environmental Rules. ­Here’s the Full List,” New York Times, 20 January 2021; and Juliet Eilperin, Brady Dennis, and John Muyskens, “Trump Rolled Back More Than 125 Environmental Safeguards. H ­ ere’s How,” Washington Post, 30 October 2020. 30. Coady et al., “Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies Remain Large,” abstract. 31. The Rus­sian corruption is definitively documented in Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy. Also see Catherine Belton, Putin’s P ­ eople: How the KGB Took Back Rus­sia and Then Took On the West (London: William Collins, 2020). The Rus­sian federal government is especially dependent on revenue from fossil fuels ­because of the Putin regime’s failure to diversify the economy: “The oil and gas sector is estimated to contribute between 10% and 20% of Rus­sia’s GDP and almost half of federal government revenues”—­ SEI (Stockholm Environment Institute) et al., The Production Gap: The Discrepancy between Countries’ Planned Fossil Fuel Production and Global Production Levels Consistent with Limiting Warming to 1.5°C or 2°C (2019), 32, https://­productiongap​.­org​ /­2019report​/­. I do not know a study of the United States fully comparable to Dawisha, but revealing studies include Robert J. Brulle, “Institutionalizing Delay: Foundation Funding and the Creation of U.S. Climate Change Counter-­Movement Organ­izations,” Climatic Change 122 (2014), 681–694, doi:10.1007/s10584-013-1018-7; Robert J. Brulle, “The Climate Lobby: A Sectoral Analy­sis of Lobbying Spending on Climate Change in the USA, 2000–2016,” Climatic Change 149 (2018), 289–303, doi:10.1007/s10584018-2241-­z; Robert J. Brulle, “Networks of Opposition: A Structural Analy­sis of U.S. Climate Change Countermovement Co­ali­tions, 1989–2015,” So­cio­log­i­cal Inquiry 20 (2019), 1–22; Alexander Hertel-­Fernandez, State Capture: How Conservative Activists, Big Businesses, and Wealthy Donors Reshaped the American States—­and the Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Leonard, Kochland; Mayer, Dark Money; and Theda Skocpol and Alexander Hertel-­Fernandez, “The Koch Network and Republican Party Extremism,” Perspectives on Politics 14 (2016), 681–699. One comprehensive philosophical analy­sis of the nature of the corruption is Wenar, Blood Oil. Both Coll, Private Empire, and Maddow, Blowout, have revealing studies of ExxonMobil’s role in Equatorial Guinea, one of the most corrupt (and cruel) governments on earth, which is also discussed in Wenar. A careful case study of the importance of accelerated depreciation of new capital investment, as provided by the US intangible drilling cost subsidy, is Peter Erickson et al., “Why Fossil Fuel Producer Subsidies ­Matter,” Nature 578, E1–­E4, doi:10.1038/s41586-019-1920-­x. The last concludes, “The economic, po­liti­ cal and symbolic effects of subsidies reinforce each other.” 32. For detailed accounting, see Dan L. Wagner et al., Bailed Out & Propped Up: U.S. Fossil Fuel Pandemic Bailouts Climb ­toward $15 Billion, Bailout Watch, Public

NOTES TO C h a p te r 5 169

Citizen and Friends of the Earth, November 2020, https://­report​.­bailoutwatch​.­org​/­. Also see, for example, Amy Harder, “U.S. Spends the Most Stimulus but Smallest Share on Green Energy,” Axios, 8 September 2020. 33. Center for International Environmental Law, Smoke and Fumes: The L ­ egal and Evidentiary Basis for Holding Big Oil Accountable for the Climate Crisis (Washington, DC: CIEL, 2017), 7–25, https://­www​.­ciel​.­org​/­reports​/­smoke​-­and​-­fumes​/­. A classic study of corporate antiscience strategy is Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010), 169–215. An account by a leading scientist attacked by the industry is Michael E. Mann, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). Coll’s magisterial study, Private Empire, summarizes with elegant understatement: “with its ideological allies, ExxonMobil funded the promotion of public confusion about climate science by means that f­ uture employees and executives of the corporation are likely to look back on with regret” (620). Also see the sources in chapter 3, notes 10 and 17. 34. David Anderson, Matt Kasper, and David Pomerantz, Utilities Knew: Documenting Electric Utilities Early Knowledge and Ongoing Deception on Climate Change from 1968–2017 (San Francisco: Energy and Policy Institute, 2017), https://­www​ .­energyandpolicy​.­org​/­utilities​-­knew​-­about​-­climate​-­change​/­. For utilities’ expenditures on lobbying, see Brulle, “Climate Lobby.” 35. Hiroko Tabuchi, “How One Firm Drove Influence Campaigns Nationwide for Big Oil,” New York Times, 11 November 2020; Zach Boren, Alexander C. Kaufman, and Lawrence Car­ter, “Revealed: BP and Shell Back Anti-­Climate Lobby Groups despite Pledges,” Huff Post, 28 September 2020; and Justin Mikulka, “Major Fossil Fuel PR Group Is b ­ ehind Eu­rope Pro-­Hydrogen Push,” DeSmog: Clearing the PR Pollution That Clouds Climate Science, 9 December 2020, https://­www​.­desmogblog​.­com​/­2020​/­12​/­09​ /­fti​-­consulting​-­fossil​-­fuel​-­pr​-­group​-­behind​-­europe​-­hydrogen​-­lobby. 36. Wallace-­Wells, Uninhabitable Earth, 220. 37. David Sheppard, “Pandemic Crisis Offers Glimpse into Oil Industry’s ­Future,” Financial Times, 3 May 2020. 38. Stokes, Short Circuiting Policy, 2. 39. Tom Sanzillo, “­Here’s Why the Texas Railroad Commission Should Regulate Flaring in the Oil Fields,” IEEFA Weekly Dispatch, 12 June 2020, https://­ieefa​.­org​/­ieefa​-­update​ -­heres​-­why​-­the​-­texas​-­railroad​-­commission​-­should​-­regulate​-­flaring​-­in​-­the​-­oil​-­fields​/­. 40. Jonathan Watts, Jillian Ambrose, and Adam Vaughan, “Oil Companies Scrambling to Raise Output in Final ‘Fossil Fuel Harvest,’ ” Guardian, 11 October 2019, Special Investigation: The Polluters, 12. Also see Stokes, Short Circuiting Policy, 240. 41. Decisions about whose assets are left in the ground o ­ ught, of course, to be made demo­cratically, not left to oil executives or state bureaucrats. For examination of whose assets o ­ ught to be the ones stranded, see Greg Muttitt and Sivan Kartha, “Equity, Climate Justice and Fossil Fuel Extraction: Princi­ples for a Managed Phase Out,” Climate Policy 20 (2020), doi:10.1080/14693062.2020.1763900. Fair phase-­out is a relatively unexplored topic.

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42. Michael Lazarus and Cleo Verkuijl, The Production Gap 2020 Special Report: The Discrepancy between Countries’ Planned Fossil Fuel Production and Global Production Levels Consistent with Limiting Warming to 1.5°C or 2°C (SEI, IISD, ODI, E3G, and UNEP, 2020), 3 and figure ES.1, http://­productiongap​.­org​/­2020report. Chapter 4 discusses issues in a just transition away from fossil-­fuel production, especially support for badly affected workers and communities. The website includes supporting appendices. An authoritative Emissions Gap report has been published annually for a number of years; see, for example, UNEP, UNEP DTU Partnership, Emissions Gap 2020 (Nairobi: UN Environment Programme, 2020), https://­www​.­unep​.­org​/­emissions​-­gap​-­report​ -­2020. Production Gap reports ­will now appear annually as well. 43. Lazarus and Verkuijl, Production Gap 2020 Special Report, 22. Also see Erickson et al., “Why Fossil Fuel Producer Subsidies ­Matter.” 44. Lazarus and Verkuijl, Production Gap 2020 Special Report, 25. On the US government specifically, see Wagner et al., Bailed Out & Propped Up; and Harder, “U.S. Spends the Most Stimulus but Smallest Share on Green Energy.” 45. A somewhat jargon-­ridden but still instructive study of BP’s advertising at an ­earlier period is Julie Doyle, “Where Has All the Oil Gone? BP Branding and the Discursive Elimination of Climate Change Risk,” in Culture, Environment and Ecopolitics, ed. Nick Heffernan and David Wragg (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2011), 200–225. Doyle shows how BP’s introduction of the notion of a carbon footprint shifts the burden for action from the seller to the consumer, just as the petrochemical manufacturers of plastics have made the prob­lem seem to be lack of sufficient recycling by consumers rather than far too much production and marketing by the plastic makers. 46. International Energy Agency, The Oil and Gas Industry in Energy Transitions, 20 January 2020, 47, https://­webstore​.­iea​.­org​/­the​-­oil​-­and​-­gas​-­industry​-­in​-­energy​ -­transitions. 47. Also see Andrew Grant and Mike Coffin, Breaking the Habit—­Why None of the Large Oil Companies Are “Paris-­Aligned,” and What They Need to Do to Get Th ­ ere, Carbon Tracker Initiative, 13 September 2019, https://­www​.­carbontracker​.­org​/­reports​ /­breaking​-­the​-­habit​/­. 48. Sierra Club, “Citigroup Is Latest Major US Bank to Rule Out Funding for Arctic Refuge Drilling,” 20 April 2020, https://­www​.­sierraclub​.­org​/­press​-­releases​/­2020​ /­04​/­breaking​-­citigroup​-­latest​-­major​-­us​-­bank​-­r ule​-­out​-­funding​-­for​-­arctic​-­refuge. But also see Nicholas Kusnetz, “Banks’ Vows to Restrict Loans for Arctic Oil and Gas Development May Be Largely Symbolic,” Inside Climate News, 5 May 2020, https://­ insideclimatenews​.­org​/­news​/­05052020​/­oil​-­gas​-­banks​-­arctic​-­drilling​-­coronavirus​/­. 49. Alison Kirsch et  al., Banking on Climate Change: Fossil Fuel Finance Report 2020 (Rainforest Action Network et al., 2020), 3, https://­www​.­ran​.­org​/­bankingon​ climatechange2020​/­; interactive data sites included. 50. Kirsch et al., Banking on Climate Change, 8. Also see Joe Romm, “The Stunning Hy­poc­risy of JP Morgan and CEO Jamie Dimon,” ThinkProgress, 22 March 2019, https://­archive​.­thinkprogress​.­org​/­stunning​-­hypocrisy​-­of​-­jp​-­morgan​-­jamie​-­dimon​-­on​ -­climate​-­change​-­a3fd2ecfbbbd​/­.

NOTES TO C h a p te r 5 171

51. Kirsch et al., Banking on Climate Change, 11. 52. Kirsch et al., Banking on Climate Change, 4. 53. Kirsch et al., Banking on Climate Change, 14. 54. One imaginative co­ali­t ion is Stop the Money Pipeline, https://­s topthe​ moneypipeline​.­com​/­. BankTrack provides a ­free weekly newsletter on climate-­ relevant bank activity: https://­www​.­banktrack ​.­org​/­. Bank loans to pulp and paper corporations that are fueling deforestation are now tracked at Forests & Finance, forests​ andfinance​.­org. 55. Lenferna, “Divest-­Invest.” 56. For a variety of views on how much and which aspects of capitalism need to change, see Leo Barasi, The Climate Majority: Apathy and Action in an Age of Nationalism (Oxford: New Internationalist Publications, Ltd., 2017); Naomi Klein, This Changes Every­thing: Capitalism vs. the Climate (London: Allen Lane, 2014); Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright, Climate Leviathan: A Po­liti­cal Theory of Our Planetary F ­ uture (London: Verso, 2018); and Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Po­liti­cal Power in the Age of Oil (New York: Verso, 2013). For climate action by US Evangelical Christians, see Katharine K. Wilkinson, Between God & Green: How Evangelicals Are Cultivating a ­Middle Ground on Climate Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 57. Mildenberger, Carbon Captured, 236, 237, and 240; see especially 235–251. Thanks to Simon Caney for alerting me to this analy­sis. 58. Maddow, Blowout, 351–360. Also see Wenar, Blood Oil, 316–319. 59. Bond, Vaughan, and Benham, Decline and Fall, 6. Compare the report of conclusions by influential Rystad Energy: Myles McCormick, “Coronavirus W ­ ill Hasten ‘Peak Oil’ by Three Years, Says Research Firm,” Financial Times, 18 June 2020. Rystad predicts peak oil in 2027/2028. 60. Bond, Vaughan, and Benham, Decline and Fall, 26 and 30. Also see International Energy Agency (IEA), World Energy Outlook 2020: Executive Summary, October 2020, 18–19, https://­www​.­iea​.­org​/­reports​/­world​-­energy​-­outlook​-­2020#. 61. Tim Buckley, “Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s New ‘One Sun One World One Grid’ Vision Positive,” IEEFA Weekly Dispatch, 12 June 2020, https://­ieefa​.­org​ /­ieefa​-­india​-­prime​-­minister​-­narendra​-­modis​-­new​-­one​-­sun​-­one​-­world​-­one​-­grid​-­vision​ -­positive​/­. 62. Kathy Hipple, Clark Williams-­Derry, and Tom Sanzillo, Living beyond Their Means: Cash Flows of Five Oil Majors ­Can’t Cover Dividends, Buybacks (Cleveland: Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analy­sis, 2020), figure 2, https://­ieefa​ .­org​/­ieefa​-­report​-­o il​-­majors​-­live​-­beyond​-­their​-­means​-­%e2%80%92​-­cant​-­pay​-­for​ -­dividends​-­buybacks​/­. 63. Dino Grandoni, “Big Oil Just ­Isn’t as Big as It Once Was,” Washington Post, 4 September 2020. 64. Eric Platt, “ExxonMobil Booted from the Dow a­ fter Close to a C ­ entury,” Financial Times, 25 August 2020. Chevron is the only “supermajor” left in the Dow Jones Average. 65. Kingsmill Bond et al., “The F ­ uture’s Not in Plastics: Why Plastics Demand ­Won’t Rescue the Oil Sector,” Carbon Tracker Initiative, 4 September  2020, 3,

172 NOTES TO C h a p te r 5

https://­carbontracker​.­org​/­reports​/­the​-­futures​-­not​-­in​-­plastics​/­. Also see Pew Charitable Trusts and SYSTEMIQ, Breaking the Plastic Wave: A Comprehensive Assessment of Pathways ­towards Stopping Ocean Plastic Pollution, 2020, https://­www​.­systemiq​ .­earth​/­breakingtheplasticwave​/­. 66. Bond et al., “The ­Future’s Not in Plastics,” 10. 67. Bond et al., “The ­Future’s Not in Plastics,” 16. 68. Matthew Vincent, “Threat from Climate Change to Financial Stability Bigger Than Covid-19,” Financial Times, 7 June 2020. Also see Finance Watch, Report—­ Breaking the Climate-­Finance Doom Loop, 8 June 2020, https://­www​.­finance​-­watch​ .­org​/­publication​/­breaking​-­the​-­climate​-­finance​-­doom​-­loop​/­. 69. Coral Davenport and Jeanna Smialek, “Federal Report Warns of Financial Havoc from Climate Change,” New York Times, 8 September 2020. Also see Nick Cunningham, “ ‘Uninsurable’ and ‘Unhedgeable’: Central Banks Warn of Financial Crisis from Climate Change,” DeSmog: Clearing the PR Pollution That Clouds Climate Science, 31 January 2020; and Marilyn Waite, “Carbon Accounting Should Be a Basic Requirement for Banks,” Financial Times, 30 August 2020. 70. Wenar, Blood Oil, 285–288. 71. Klein, This Changes Every­thing, 389. 72. Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 23–27. 73. Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the W ­ ill of the ­People (New York: Penguin, 2005), 144. Schell wrote, “Vio­lence is a method by which the ruthless few can subdue the passive many. Nonviolence is a means by which the active many can overcome the ruthless few.” A beautiful example is the successful opposition by the Augusta County Alliance (now part of the Alliance for the Shenandoah Valley), Chesapeake Climate Action Network, Cowpasture River Preservation Association, and numerous other grassroots organ­izations, in concert with the Southern Environmental Law Center in Charlottesville, against the destructive and unnecessary Atlantic Coast Pipeline for fracked gas that Dominion Energy and Duke Energy worked for years to force on them. 74. See, for example, Dieter Helm, Burn Out: The Endgame for Fossil Fuels (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017); and Kingsmill Bond, 2020 Vision: Why You Should See Peak Fossil Fuels Coming, Carbon Tracker Initiative, 10 September 2018, https://­carbontracker​.­org​/­reports​/­2020​-­vision​-­why​-­you​-­should​-­see​-­the​-­fossil​-­fuel​ -­peak​-­coming​/­. Also see Global Commission on the Geopolitics of Energy Transformation, A New World: The Geopolitics of the Energy Transformation (International Renewable Energy Agency, 2019), https://­www​.­irena​.­org​/­publications​/­2019​/­Jan​/­A​ -­New​-­World​-­The​-­Geopolitics​-­of​-­the​-­Energy​-­Transformation. 75. For a concrete proposal, see Stuart Jenkins et al., “Sustainable Financing of Permanent CO2 Disposal through a Carbon Takeback Obligation,” https://­arxiv​.­org​ /­abs​/­2007​.­08430. 76. Some obvious minimum steps for foreign policy are outlined by John Podesta and Todd Stern, “A Foreign Policy for the Climate: How American Leadership Can Avert Catastrophe,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2020. Two critical ones are to work closely with India in avoiding China’s coal-­intensive form of development and instead

NOTES TO App e n d ix o n I n ­e q ua lit y 173

building at last major parts of the One Sun One World One Grid electricity system and to work with allies to prevent the Bolsonaro Administration in Brazil from pushing the Amazon still further into an “ecological death spiral.” 77. Walt Kelly, Pogo: We Have Met the ­Enemy and He Is Us (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), 11.

Appendix on In­equality 1. See Leif Wenar, Blood Oil: Tyrants, Vio­lence, and the Rules That Run the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 2. An accessible overview is available in an Oxfam Media Briefing: Tim Gore with Mira Alestig and Anna Ratcliff, “Confronting Carbon In­equality: Putting Climate at the Heart of the COVID-19 Recovery,” Oxfam, 21 September 2020, https://­www​.­oxfam​ .­org​/­en​/­research​/­confronting​-­carbon​-­inequality. The full report, with details about methodology and the dataset, is S. Kartha et al., The Carbon In­equality Era: An Assessment of the Global Distribution of Consumption Emissions among Individuals from 1990 to 2015 and beyond, Joint Research Report (Oxfam and SEI, 2020), https://­www​.­sei​ .­org​/­publications​/­the​-­carbon​-­inequality​-­era. 3. Gore with Alestig and Ratcliff, “Confronting Carbon In­equality,” 2, and figures 1, 2, and 6. 4. Gore with Alestig and Ratcliff, “Confronting Carbon In­equality,” 4, emphasis in original. 5. Vari­ous ways of construing this distinction are discussed in Henry Shue, “Subsistence Protection and Mitigation Ambition: Necessities, Economic and Climatic,” British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 21 (2019), 251–262, https://­doi​ .­org​/­10​.­1177​/­1369148118819071. 6. Gore with Alestig and Ratcliff, “Confronting Carbon In­equality,” 9. 7. Yannick Oswald, Anne Owen, and Julia K. Steinberger, “Large In­equality in International and Intranational Energy Footprints between Income Groups and across Consumption Categories,” Nature Energy 5 (2020), 231–239, doi:10.1038/ s41560-020-0579-8. 8. Philippe Benoit, “A Luxury Carbon Tax to Address Climate Change and In­equality: Not All Carbon Is Created Equal,” Ethics & International Affairs blog, March 2020, https://­www​.­ethicsandinternationalaffairs​.­org​/­2020​/­a​-­luxury​-­carbon​ -­tax​-­to​-­address​-­climate​-­change​-­and​-­inequality​-­not​-­all​-­carbon​-­is​-­created​-­equal​/­.

INDEX

accelerated depreciation, 168n31 action, immediate: bank financing and, 129–130; CDR versus mitigation and, 97–103; duty and, 47; ­future generations and, 12, 75–76; ­human equality and, 79–80; international inequalities and responsibilities and, 76; rapid scaling up and, 98–103; science and, 6–7, 8–9, 21–22; self-­ interested reasons and, 7–8; socio­ po­liti­cal situation and, 16–17; and that means now, 135–136; unlimited danger and, 22–24, 76, 86–87, 163n41. See also agency; duties: promotional; Energy Revolution; historical context and historic opportunity; inaction; pivotal (pre­sent) generation; scaling up, rapid; second chances adaptation: date-­of-­last-­opportunity and, 6; ­future generations and, 76, 85; historical context and, 5; international in­equality and responsibility and, 124; sea-­level rise and, 49; sovereign externalization and, 50, 72; temporal externalization and, 114 Africa, 74, 121. See also Niger Delta agency: generations and, 79–80; local versus global, 60, 69, 79, 150n25; responsibility and, 60–61. See also action, immediate; individual agency, responsibility and rights; duties: promotional; pure fairness argument; responsibility, generational; social movements agriculture and agribusiness: BECCS and, 101–102; Brazil and, 99; causal

responsibility and, 33; CO2 and, 37; fossil-­fuel combustion and, 6; industrialization of, 5; ­Little Ice Age and, 20–21; trees, land, and ­water and, 99–100. See also food air carbon capture and storage, 100 air pollution, 33 Alaska, 79 Alliance for the Shenandoah Valley, 172n73 alternative/noncarbon/renewable energy: affordability of, 66–75, 110; avoidable necessity and, 47; avoidance of danger versus savings and, 14; CCS and, 156n32; CO2 emissions rise and, 120; coronavirus pandemic and, 126–127; cost-­sharing and, 40–41; fossil fuel energy and, 7–8; India and, 158n49; infrastructure and transmission of, 124; investments in, 66–67, 110; new global electricity and, 132; prices of, 67, 70–71, 72–73, 129, 132; 2050 and, 63. See also Energy Revolution; solar energy; wind energy Amazon rainforest, 78, 81, 99, 164n56. See also Brazil AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation), 78–79, 159n59 Antarctic ice sheets, 24, 49, 147nn44 and 49, 164nn51 and 54; East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS), 25, 112–113; West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), 25, 59, 76–79, 81, 82, 85, 111–113, 147n52 Anthropocene period, 18, 54–55, 145n29 apocalypses, 21

175

176 IN D EX

the Arctic, 49, 79, 155 artificial intelligence (AI), 38, 71 assault analogy, 46 asset retirement obligations (AROs), 121–122 Atlantic Coast Pipeline, 172n73 Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), 78–79, 159n59 Augusta County Alliance, 172n73 Australia, 7, 16, 67, 99, 105, 118, 131, 157n43 autonomy, 48. See also individual agency, responsibility, and rights avoidable necessity, 47 Baier, Annette, 114 Bangladesh, 62 Banking on Climate Change (Rainforest Action Network), 128 banks, 118, 123, 128–130, 132, 133, 171n54 Bassey, Nnimmo, 65 BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage), 100–103. See also carbon capture and storage (CCS) beef-­raising, 99, 100 beer-­drinkers, 162n31 Bellamy, Rob, 101 ­Belt and Road Initiative (China), 52, 71, 152n39, 157n42 benefits: costs and, 62, 150n18; international inequalities and, 51; sovereign externalization and, 48; US government and, 33; violation of rights and, 47. See also fairness; international inequalities and responsibilities Berners-­Lee, Mike, 161n16 Betts, Richard, 146n42 bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), 100–103. See also carbon capture and storage (CCS) BlackRock, 123, 167n26 Blake, William, 116, 165n56 blame, 41–42. See also causal responsibility; moral reasons and responsibility boycotts, 129, 134 BP, 132, 170n45

Brazil: accountability and, 57; agribusiness and, 99, 100, 102; contributions of, 56; po­liti­cal power and policy and, 16, 118, 131, 173n76. See also Amazon rainforest breathing, 99 Britain and ­Great Britain, 32, 70, 134 Broecker, Wallace, 18 Buckley, Tim, 158n49 burdens and harms: CO2 emissions and, 15–16; fairness and, 10–11; nontransferable, 145n26. See also costs; international inequalities and responsibilities; moral reasons and responsibilities; risk structure; threats, unlimited; wrongful imposition arguments The Burning Question (Berners-­Lee and Clark), 161n16 Bush, George H.W., 90 business as usual. See fossil fuel regime/carbon regime/ energy-­business-­as-­usual Butt, Daniel, 150n17 California, 99 Canada, 126, 128 Caney, Simon, 143n6, 149n9, 152n43 cap-­and-­dividend, 64, 65–66. See also regulation capital. See banks; subsidies, fossil fuel capitalism, 130, 171n56 carbon, price of, 64–75 carbon bud­get: affordability of noncarbon energy and, 38, 66–75; CO2 emissions and, 29, 63; cumulative, 93, 133, 160n75; decomposition of CO2 and, 30; economic development and, 70; international inequalities and responsibilities and, 70, 75; nations at a disadvantage and, 38; overshoot and, 93–95, 96, 97, 112, 113, 114–115; price of electricity and, 68–75; richest individuals and, 139–140; temperature rise and, 7, 70, 92. See also overshoots carbon capture and storage (CCS), 9, 119, 120–121, 156n32; fossil fuel

IN D EX 177

interests and, 95, 119, 121, 156n32. See also bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) “carbon footprint,” 170n45 carbon neutrality. See net zero emissions carbon tax, 65–66. See also regulation Carbon Tracker Initiative, 132–133, 166n20 Ca­rib­bean coral reefs, 164n56 causal responsibility, 118; ability to pay and, 152n43; international inequalities and responsibilities and, 71–72, 80–81; moral responsibility versus, 37–42. See also Industrial Revolution; nations with an advantage Center for Responsive Politics, 167n27 Central Amer­i­ca, 16 the Cerrado, 100 Chesapeake Energy, 121–122 Chevron, 132 ­children’s lawsuit, 164n47 China: accountability and, 56, 57; banks and, 128–129; CO2 emissions and, 43, 70, 161n9; coal and, 39, 52, 69, 70, 71, 152n39, 156n36, 172n76; cumulative emissions and, 161n9; deforestation and, 100; fossil fuel interests and, 122, 126, 128, 129; global electricity grids and, 157n43; India compared to, 59; state-­owned fossil fuel companies and, 122; US policy and, 172n76. See also ­Belt and Road Initiative; international inequalities and responsibilities “choke-­points,” 134 Churchill, Winston, 10 civilized socie­ties, 23 Clark, Duncan, 161n16 climate change, anthropogenic versus natu­ral, 22. See also CO2 emissions; science “Climate Change and Non-­Ideal Theory: Six Ways of Responding to Non-­ Compliance” (Caney), 143n6 climate models, 29 A Climate of Risk (Hartzell-­Nichols), 22 coal: Anthropocene period and, 54–55; bank financing of, 129; China and,

39, 52, 152n39, 156n36; costs of, 46–47, 65; electric utilities and, 124–125, 167n26; Energy Revolution and, 63–64; health costs and, 65; inaction and, 24; India and, 59, 62; policies and, 120. See also fossil fuel regime/carbon regime/energy-­ business-­as-­usual; Industrial Revolution and industrialization coal miners, 38, 46, 79, 106, 134 coastal flooding, 16, 24, 78. See also floods Coleman, Jules, 38 Coll, Steve, 169n33 compound injustice, 71, 74, 75, 158n45 Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (2018) (COP24), 30 consciousness, 3, 26 consumption, 18, 26–27, 60–61, 119–120, 139–140, 170n45 contraception, 71 Cooper, Gregory S., 164n56 cooperation, 16–17, 83 COP24 (Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2018), 30 coral reefs, 164n56 coronavirus pandemic, 110, 120, 123–124, 126–127, 128, 153n10, 171n59 Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Rus­sia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth (Maddow), 167n24 corruption, 123, 133, 168n31 corrupt law, 151n38 costs: absence of fault and, 38–39; benefits and, 62, 150n18; carbon regime and, 33–34; cleanup, 121–122; Energy Revolution and, 37–38, 40–41, 52–53, 80; externalization and, 154n20; mitigation versus CDR and, 96; US government and, 33. See also fairness; international inequalities and responsibilities; ordinary costs; sovereign externalization; wrongful imposition arguments

178 IN D EX

CO2 capture and storage (CCS), 9, 29. See also CO2 removal (CDR) CO2, compensatory, 162n24 CO2 emissions: acceleration of, 91–92; alternative energy impacts on, 120; anthropogenic, 18; cumulative, 1, 6–7, 19, 62–63, 91, 139–140, 161n9; international inequalities and responsibilities and, 74–75; international law and, 151n34; price of carbon and, 72, 123; since 1850, 9; tipping points and, 76; in 2019, 6; 2050 and, 63; unlimited threats and, 17, 19–20. See also action, immediate; adaptation; benefits; carbon bud­get; costs; fossil fuels; green­house gas (GHG) emissions; international inequalities and responsibilities; mitigation; net zero emissions; po­liti­cal leaders and policies; and individual countries CO2eq, 161n19 CO2 levels, annual, 99 CO2, net negative, 162n24 CO2 removal (CDR): asset-­rescue, 95, 148n4; carbon bud­get and, 93; enhancement, 95–96, 98; fossil fuel interests and, 9, 95; IPCC and, 144n21; ­limited warming and, 94–95; mitigation now versus, 97–103; remedial, 95–98, 111–113, 115, 162n25. See also BECCS (bio­ energy with carbon capture and storage); carbon capture and storage (CCS); CO2 capture and storage (CCS) CO2 Rising: The World’s Greatest Environmental Challenge (Volk), 162n31 credit ­unions, 129 Cripps, Elizabeth, 165n8 Crutzen, Paul, 54–55 Cullenward, Danny, 155n31 “current generation,” 10 date-­of-­last-­opportunity: fossil fuel regime lies and, 130; generational responsibility and, 145n26; inaction and, 87–88; international responsibilities, 77–82; mitigation and, 14–15; overshoot and, 114. See also

inaction; irreversible changes; second chances; tipping points Dearing, John A., 164n56 deaths and misery, 7, 20, 33, 46, 62, 65, 123. See also health deceptions, lies, and secrecy, 2, 118–119, 124–128, 130–136, 160n7, 167n25, 170n45. See also transparency deforestation, 5, 37, 99–100 demand, peak, 132 demonstrations and strikes, 121, 134 denial, 31, 89, 125 Denman Glacier, 164n54 Dill, Janina, 148n7 distributive mechanism, fair, 14, 105 divestment, 134–135 Dodd-­Frank Wall Street reform law (2010), 131, 133 Dominion Energy, 172n73 Doyle, Julie, 170n45 drilling, 168n31 drought, 7 Duke Energy, 152n40, 172n73 duties: promotional, 165n8; unconditional, 17–18 duty of care, 109 duty to stop immediately, 105 economic ­factors: development, 7–8, 58–59, 66–67, 70, 75–76, 99, 150n24; fossil fuel regime and, 131–132; mitigation and, 94, 109–110; pension funds, 95; Rus­sia and, 168n31; supply-­side, 64, 72, 74, 92, 122, 126, 127, 130, 154n19. See also fossil fuel regime/carbon regime/ energy-­business-­as-­usual; market mechanisms; po­liti­cal leaders and policies; self-­interested reasons; sovereign externalization; subsidies, fossil fuel education, 71, 78 electricity grids, 38, 66, 68, 75, 132, 157n43. See also One Sun One World One Grid (India) electric vehicles, 38, 120 Emissions Gap reports, 170n42 Enbridge (Line 3 tar sands oil pipeline in Minnesota), 129

IN D EX 179

energy-­business-­as-­usual. See fossil fuel regime/carbon regime/energy-­ business-­as-­usual energy poverty, 58–59, 62 Energy Revolution: coal and, 63–64; costs of, 37–38, 40–41, 52–53, 80; fair allocation of costs and, 38–42; fossil fuel interests and, 59, 61–62; international inequalities and responsibility and, 61–66, 73, 124; ­limited dangers and, 114; nations at a disadvantage and, 66–75; transition plans and, 5. See also action, immediate; alternative/noncarbon/renewable energy; ­future generations; moral reasons and responsibilites; pivotal generation; self-­interested reasons environmental costs, 64–65 equality, ­human, 80, 139–141. See also international inequalities and responsibilities Equatorial Guinea, 168n31 Eu­rope, 72, 79, 128 Evangelical Christians, 171n56 exploitation, conscious, 56, 108 exports and imports, 71, 134 externalization, 43–44, 121–122, 133, 154n24. See also sovereign externalization; temporal externalization ExxonMobil, 125, 130, 132, 167n24, 168n31, 169n33 fairness: blame versus, 41–42; burdens and, 10–11; camel-­bearing-­four-­ trunks analogy and, 40; cost allocation and, 150n18; mitigation costs and, 105–106; sovereign externalization and, 47–57; transferable burdens and, 145n26; unseen difficulties and, 42. See also benefits; costs; intergenerational justice; international inequalities and responsibilities; pure fairness argument; “wrong person” objection “Fair-­Share Carbon Dioxide Removal Increases Major Emitter Responsibility (Fyson et al.), 162n25 Faulkner, William, 4, 35 feedback, positive, 23–25, 115, 146n42

feed-in tariffs, 66 Fifth Assessment Report (IPCC) (2014), 94–95 fires, 7, 99 floods, 15, 28, 47, 61, 62. See also coastal flooding food, 100. See also agriculture and agribusiness foresight, 41 fossil fuel regime/carbon regime/ energy-­business-­as-­usual: bankruptcies and, 7–8, 121–122; capital, capital investments and capital expenditures, 35, 57, 110, 123, 127–128, 168n31; divestment and, 129; ­future dangers and, 115; historical context and, 91; inaction and, 9; individual responsibility and, 170n45; negative duties and, 118–119; projected production and, 125–126; renewables and, 8; responsibility and, 33–42, 61; risk structure and, 104; social movements and, 119, 130–136; solar radiation management and, 163n40; stranded assets and, 95, 126, 132, 133, 166n20, 169n41; stranded liabilities and, 122, 166n20; top executives’ incentives and, 154n27. See also agriculture and agribusiness; banks; CO2 emissions; deceptions, lies, and secrecy; economic ­factors; externalization; fossil fuels; historical context and historic opportunity; international inequalities and responsibilities; po­liti­cal leaders and policies; pure fairness argument; science; subsidies, fossil fuel; and individual countries fossil fuels: action now and, 6; ­percent of total energy supply of, 92; price of, 64–67, 71, 72–73, 74. See also CO2 emissions; coal; consumption; fossil fuel regime/carbon regime/ energy-­business-­as-­usual; gas; green­house gas (GHG) emissions; historical context and historic opportunity; hydrogen; responsibility, generational fracking, 65, 121, 122, 129, 132, 172n73

180 IN D EX

Framework Convention on Climate Change (1992), 2, 90 Francis I (pope), 75, 158n53 ­future generations: arbitrary demands and, 8–9; burdens and, 12–17, 26; choices and, 9, 23, 26; CO2 emissions and, 7; fossil fuel interests and, 119; Pope Francis I on, 158n53; responsibilities of, 149n13; selfishness and, 141. See also burdens and harms; inaction; mitigation; responsibility, generational; threats, unlimited Fyson, Claire L. et al., 162n25 G-20 governments, 64 Gardiner, Stephen, 105 gas, 38, 52, 122, 123, 125, 166n19. See also fossil fuel regime/carbon regime/energy-­business-­as-­usual; fracking; pipelines Gazprom, 130 Geden, Oliver, 101 “genealogy of the carbon economy,” 150n26 generational responsibility. See responsibility, generational generation of 1940s, 10–11 generation of 1960s, 11–12 geologic history, 25–26 Germany, 66. Ghosh, Amitav, 150nn25 and 26 Global Crisis: War, Climate Change & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth ­Century (Parker), 20–21 Global Warming of 1.5°C, 7, 95. See also “Special Report on 1.5” ­Great Britain, 32, 70, 134 ­Great Depression, 21 The ­Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Ghosh), 150nn25 and 26 green­house gas (GHG) emissions, 5, 6, 32–33, 48, 69–70, 92, 94, 161n19, 166n11. See also CO2 emissions; Industrial Revolution and industrialization; methane; net zero emissions; temperature rise Greenland ice sheet, 24, 25, 79, 81, 91, 147nn44 and 47, 148n50, 159n62, 161n13

Guardian investigation (newspaper), 125–126 Gulf Stream. See AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation) guns, 16 Halliburton, 122–123 Hansson, Sven Ove, 104 Hartzell-­Nichols, Lauren, 22 Hausfather, Zeke, 146n42 Havel, Václav, 41 health, 32, 64–65, 69, 119, 123, 154n20. See also deaths and misery; wrongful imposition arguments Helm, Dieter, 126 Hermansson, Hélène, 104 historical context and historic opportunity, 3–13, 36–37, 76, 83, 90–94, 145n26, 163n41. See also date-­of-­ last-­opportunity; deceptions, lies, and secrecy; Industrial Revolution and industrialization; po­liti­cal leaders and policies Hobbes, Thomas, 20 hope, 84–86 “Hot­house Earth,” 24 ­human extinction, 17–18, 21, 23, 85, 146n36 “­Human Rights, Responsibilities, and Climate Change” (Caney), 149nn9 and 13, 152n43 Hungary, 20 hydrogen, 125 ice-­sheet melting. See Antarctic ice sheets; Greenland ice sheet; sea-­level rise identity, 27, 28, 50, 144n24 inaction: additional risks and, 14–15; consequences of versus costs, 80; fossil fuel interests and, 9; ­f uture danger and, 103–111, 155; ­f uture remediation and, 162n25; science and, 6; unlimited dangers and, 21–22. See also date-­of-­last-­opportunity India: air pollution and, 59; alternative energy and, 158n49; BECCS feedstocks and, 102; carbon bud­get and, 69–70; CO2 emissions and, 40, 69–70, 74–75; energy poverty and,

IN D EX 181

58, 62, 72, 74; Energy Revolution and, 68–75; fossil fuel interests and, 122; industrialization and, 32–33; international inequalities and responsibilities and, 58–59, 62, 74; planetary electricity grid and, 68, 71, 72, 173n76; renewable energy and, 158n49; state-­owned fossil fuel companies and, 122; thermal power and, 158n49; US foreign policy and, 72–73, 74, 172n76. See also energy poverty; international inequalities and responsibilities “India’s Electricity Sector Transformation Has Made Pro­gress in 2019/20” (Buckley and Warrington), 158n49 individual agency, responsibility, and rights: carbon cycle and, 28; externalization and, 150n24; fairness and, 55, 150n18; fossil fuel interests and, 121, 170n45; of ­future generations, 119; group effects and, 79; identities and, 144n24; India’s poor and, 58–59; institutions and practices versus, 60–61, 83; national responsibility and, 30–31, 42, 43, 45, 60–61, 148n7; negative duties and, 118; po­liti­cal power and, 131; Rawls and, 149n9; wrongful harms and, 46–47. See also consumption; luxury carbon taxes; pure fairness argument; social movements; wrongful imposition arguments individual inequalities, 139–141 Industrial Revolution and industrialization: causal responsibility and, 81; CO2 emissions and, 3–4; CO2 levels and, 6; coal and, 32–33; delayed costs and, 33–34; effects of, 32; green­house gas emissions and, 5, 33; individual choices and, 30; international in­equality and, 139; irreversible change and, 116; pre­sent and, 27; pure fairness argument and, 36–37; sovereign externalization and, 43–44; strikes and, 134. See also agriculture and agribusiness; CO2 emissions;

fossil fuel regime/carbon regime/ energy-­business-­as-­usual in­equality. See individual inequalities; international inequalities and responsibilities; sovereign externalization infrastructure, 35, 57, 124 Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analy­sis (Cleveland), 68–69, 167n20 institutions and practices, 36, 60–61, 83, 118, 120, 123, 135 insurers, 123 “integral fabric,” 13, 145n26 integrated assessment models (IAMs), 144n21 intentions, 5–6, 40, 56. See also causal responsibility; knowledge; moral reasons and responsibilities intergenerational justice, 13, 15–16, 103–104, 107–108, 158n53. See also ­future generations; pivotal (pre­ sent) generation; Rawls, John; responsibility, generational Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 7, 94–95 internalization of negative externalities, 44 internal versus external emission reductions, 94 International Energy Agency (IEA), 126–127 international inequalities and responsibilities: adequate sacrifices and, 82–88; affordability of noncarbon energy and, 66–75; benefits and costs and, 151n35; causal responsibility and, 71–72, 80–81; con­ temporary strangers and prices and, 66–75; coronavirus and, 126–127; date-­of-­last-­opportunity and, 77–82; Dodd-­Frank reform law and, 133; domestic justice distinguished from, 152n40; dual obligations for mitigation and, 94; Energy Revolution and, 61–66, 73, 124; fairness and, 49–52, 55; ­future strangers and tipping points and, 75–76; India and, 58–59, 72–73; individual agency versus institutions and practices,

182 IN D EX

international inequalities and responsibilities (continued ) 60–61, 139–141; intergenerational justice and, 80–81; local versus global agency and, 60, 69, 79, 150n25; noncarbon energy and, 124; past and pre­sent, 59–60; pre­sent and ­future generations and, 75; risk structure and, 105–106; solar radiation management and, 162n40. See also equality, ­human; sacrifices, pre­sent; sovereign externalization; space gaps international justice. See international inequalities and responsibilities international law, 151n34 international negotiations, 33, 51–52. See also COP24 (Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2018); Paris Agreement (2015) IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), 94–95, 98–99, 101, 144n21, 146n42 Iran, 122 irreversible changes, 25–26, 59, 78, 84–88, 111–116. See also Antarctic ice sheets; date-­of-­last-­opportunity; Greenland ice sheet; tipping points Jamieson, Dale, 151n35 Japan, 128 jobs, 38, 52, 71, 126, 166n19, 170n42. See also coal miners justice, domestic versus international, 152n40. See also intergenerational justice; international inequalities and responsibilities King, Martin Luther, Jr., 10 Klein, Naomi, 134, 154n23 knowledge, 5–6, 106–107. See also science Koch Industries, 122, 123, 130, 167n25 land use, 5, 37, 65, 96, 99, 100, 101. See also agriculture and agribusiness Lazarus, Michael, 126, 170n42 Lenzi, Dominic, 90 Leonard, Christopher, 167n25

­ ittle Ice Age, 20–21 L Louisiana marshes, 147n48 Lovejoy, Tom, 78 Lugar, Richard, 131 luxury carbon taxes, 140–141 Maddow, Rachel, 167n24 Making Climate Policy Work (Cullenward and Victor), 155n31 Malm, Andreas, 23–24 Mann, Michael E., 169n33 market mechanisms: causal responsibility and, 73; flooding markets, 125–126; fossil fuel interests and, 122–123, 125–126; negative duties and, 118–124; po­liti­cal leaders and policies and, 155n31; regulation versus, 64, 74; stability and, 133. See also fossil fuel regime/carbon regime/energy-­business-­as-­usual; prices McKinnon, Catriona, 145n26, 146n40 means and ends, 109 methane, 6, 79, 122, 166n19 mi­grants and refugees, 16, 20, 24, 83 Mildenberger, Matto, 131 Mitchell, Timothy, 117, 134 mitigation: CDR and, 96, 97–98, 103, 104; distributed sacrifices and, 105; dual obligations for, 93–94; economic costs and, 94, 109–110; ­future burdens and, 14; India’s costs and, 72; po­liti­cal power and, 131; unlimited risks and, 162n41; zero emissions and, 14, 93, 105, 106, 107. See also CO2 removal (CDR); negative emission technologies (NETs) and other mitigations; temper­ature rise monsoons, 72 Mooney, Chris, 147n48 moral ­hazard, 96 moral reasons and responsibilities: causal responsibility versus, 37–42; historic opportunity and, 10–13; overachievement and, 87–88. See also deceptions, lies, and secrecy; duties, unconditional; fairness; historical context and

IN D EX 183

historic opportunity; international inequalities and responsibilities; responsibility, generational; self-­ interested reasons; wrongful imposition arguments Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), 94, 134 national responsibility. See individual agency, responsibility, and rights; international inequalities and responsibilities; pure fairness argument; sovereign externalization; United States and other sovereign states nations at a disadvantage: affordability of noncarbon energy and, 38, 66–75; burdens and, 16; carbon bud­get and, 38; delayed costs and, 33–42; hope and, 85–86. See also international inequalities and responsibilities; Nigeria and other nations nations with an advantage: causal responsibility and, 33; costs and benefits and, 33–42; dual obligations for mitigation and, 94; ranking and, 56; state-­owned companies and, 122, 124, 126; wrongful imposition arguments and, 43–54. See also fossil fuel regime/carbon regime/ energy-­business-­as-­usual; individual agency and responsibility; international inequalities and responsibilities; sovereign externalization; United States and other nations natu­ral law, 152n38 natu­ral pro­cesses, 29 natu­ral species, 24 Nazis, 10–11. NDCs (Nationally Determined Contributions), 94, 105 necessity, avoidable, 47 negative duties, 118 negative emission technologies (NETs), 92–93, 94–95 negative emissions, 92, 95. See also CO2 removal (CDR) negative externalities, 44. See also externalization net negative CO2, 162n24

net zero emissions, 107; bank financing and, 129; breathing and, 99; climate change and, 14; CO2 bud­get and, 160n75; consumption and, 119–120; fossil fuel interests and, 117–118, 125, 127–128; government policies and, 134, 135; individual consumption and, 119–120; po­liti­cal power and, 131; possibility of, 162n40; temperature rise and, 92, 96; unlimited climate change and, 19. See also action, immediate; mitigation Nigeria, 65, 154n23 “no offense” objection, 35–36, 37–38 noncarbon energy. See alternative/ noncarbon/renewable energy; solar energy; wind energy nonhuman ­factors, 19, 22, 23–24 nonviolence, 172n73 Northern Hemi­sphere and, 99 Norway, 122 Obama administration, 134 Obiangs (Equatorial Guinea), 131 ocean floor, 159n61 oceans, 24, 65, 79, 99, 162n40. See also sea-­level rise Ohio State University, 159n62 oil. See fossil fuels; fracking; pipelines; subsidies, fossil fuel oil leaks, 65 1.5°C rise, 7, 77–78, 92, 93, 94–95, 126. See also temperature rise One Sun One World One Grid (India), 68, 71, 72, 173n76 Open Secrets Newsletter (Center for Responsive Politics), 167n27 Orbán, Victor, 20 ordinary costs, 46–54, 150n24, 151n27. See also costs overshoots, 93–95, 96, 97, 112, 113, 114–115 Oxfam, 139–140 Oxford University, 134–135 Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), 7–8 Paris Agreement (2015), 30, 53, 104, 105, 125, 126, 127, 128, 134, 153n10 Parker, Geoffrey, 20–21

184 IN D EX

peak demand, 132 peak oil, 171n59 pipelines, 67, 121, 123, 129, 147n48, 172n73 pivotal (pre­sent) generation: arbitrary demands and, 8–17; carbon prices and, 64–75; defined, 10, 164n47; fate of the planet and, 2; fossil fuel interests and, 135; ­future dangers and, 103–111, 114–115; international inequalities and responsibilities and, 75–76; past sacrifices and, 83; reach of, 4–5. See also action, immediate; historical context and historic opportunity; identity; responsibility, generational; sacrifices, pre­sent plastic, 121, 125, 132–133, 166n11, 170n45 po­liti­cal leaders and policies: Brazil and, 16, 118, 131, 173n76; dysfunction of, 16–17, 21; failure of, 120–121; fossil fuel interests and, 52, 65, 115, 117–118, 123–124, 131, 153n8, 162n40; fossil fuels prices and, 64–67; ­future dangers and, 17, 115; global solutions and, 17; historical context and, 90–91; market mechanisms and, 155n31; net zero carbon and, 119; partisan politics and, 16; renewable energy and, 120; risk structure and, 104; social movements and, 134–135; structural change and, 130–131; 2°C rise and, 63; unlimited threats and, 20–22; wasted time and, 2. See also adaptation; cap-­and-­ dividend; carbon tax; CO2 removal (CDR); historical context and historic opportunity; luxury carbon taxes; mitigation; nations with an advantage; regulation; social movements; sovereign externalization; subsidies, fossil fuel poor countries. See international inequalities and responsibilities poor individuals, 140 population growth, 71, 100 positive feedback, 23–25, 115, 146n42, 155 postindustrial society, 26–27 Practical Action, 74

practices and institutions, 36, 60–61, 83, 118, 120, 123, 135 PR firms, 123 prices: of carbon, 64–75, 123; of electricity, 68–75; of food, 20; of fossil fuels, 64–67, 71, 72–73, 74; of renewables, 67, 70–71, 72–73, 129, 132. See also negative externalities Private Empire (Coll), 169n33 The Production Gap (SEI and UNEP), 91–92 The Production Gap 2020 Special Report (Lazarus and Verkuijl), 126, 170n42 profit, 44 “profiteering delay,” 125 punishment, 36–37, 38, 39 pure fairness argument, 36–42, 72. See also fairness; “wrong person” objection Putin, Vladimir. See Rus­sia and Vladimir Putin race, 16 Rainforest Action Network, 128 rationing, 64 Rawls, John, 13–14, 105–106, 107, 110, 144nn23 and 24, 145n26, 149n9 reaction time, 76 “rebound” phenomena, 161n16 Rectifying International Injustice: Princi­ples of Compensation and Restitution between Nations (Butt), 150n17 recycling, 121, 133, 170n45 re­distribution of burdens, 10–11 re­distribution of wealth, 51–52, 73–74, 108 reforestation, 99, 102–103 “Regime Shifts Occur Disproportionately Faster in Larger Ecosystems” (Cooper, Willcock, and Dearing), 164n56 regulation, 44, 64–65, 74, 123–124, 134. See also cap-­and-­dividend and other regulations; po­liti­cal leaders and policies responsibility, generational: agency and, 60–61; Caney’s schema and, 143n6; “carbon footprint” and, 170n45; CO2

IN D EX 185

emissions and, 22, 35; fairness and, 54–55, 57; ­future dangers and, 23; historical context and, 145n26; hope and, 85–86; identity and, 27; India and, 59; national past and, 31–39; obligations and, 13–14; overview, 1–8; past, pre­sent, and ­future and, 3; past and, 28–29; Rawls on, 144n23, 145n26; reversible and irreversible effect and, 113–114. See also Anthropocene period; benefits; burdens and harms; causal responsibility; costs; duties, promotional; duties, unconditional; individual agency, responsibility, and rights; international inequalities and responsibilities; moral reasons and responsibility; pivotal (pre­sent) generation; pure fairness argument; sacrifices, pre­sent Reus-­Smit, Christian, 151n38 Revelle, Roger, 18 reversible and irreversible changes, 25, 103–111, 113–114, 115. See also date-­of-­ last-­opportunity; tipping points Rich, Nathaniel, 160n7 richest individuals, 139–140 rights. See individual agency, responsibility, and rights risk structure, 104–105, 109, 145n26 Royal Dutch Shell, 132. See also Shell Oil Rus­sia and Vladimir Putin: accountability and, 56, 57; citizen action and, 131; fossil fuel interests and, 16, 43, 61, 118, 122, 123, 126, 167n24, 168n31 “ruthless few,” 134 Rystad Energy, 126 sacrifices, pre­sent: adequacy of, 82–87; choices and, 9–11; fair distributive mechanisms and, 14, 105; historical context and, 8–9, 11–12; past sacrifices and, 83. See also burdens and harms; consumption; luxury carbon taxes; individual agency, responsibility, and rights safety, 119, 123

Saro-­Wiwa, Ken, 154n23 Saudi Arabia, 16, 118, 122, 130, 131 Saudi Aramco, 130 scaling up, rapid, 98–103 Scheffler, Samuel, 60, 61, 79, 114 Schell, Jonathan, 134, 172n73 Schlumberger, 122–123 science: action now and, 6–7, 8–9, 21–22; CO2 levels and, 62–63; fossil fuel interests and, 119, 124–125, 169n33; historical context and historic opportunity and, 9, 18; intentional control and, 5–6; intervention and reaction times and, 76; politicians and policies and, 21, 70; tipping points and, 58 sea-­ice. See Antarctic ice sheets; the Arctic; Greenland ice sheet sea-­level rise: carbon emissions and, 3–4; Denman Glacier and, 164n54; ice-­sheet melting and, 24–26; India and, 62, 74; international in­equality and, 49, 60, 62; Totten Glacier and, 112. See also coastal flooding; ice-­ sheet melting; West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) second chances: CDR and, 94–104; historical context and, 90–94; reversible and irreversible changes and, 103–111; scaling up and, 98–103. See also date-­of-­last-­opportunity The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in Amer­i­ca (Leonard), 167n25 Section 1504. See Dodd-­Frank Wall Street reform law sediment cores, 147n48 self-­interested reasons, 7–9, 95, 110, 153n8. See also economic ­factors; sovereign externalization separation, illusions of, 2–5 ser­vice companies, 122–123 Shell Oil, 65, 122, 125, 130, 154n23. See also Royal Dutch Shell Shue, Henry, 90, 96, 137–138, 149nn14 and 16, 152nn41 and 43, 158nn45 and 47 Smoke and Fumes: The ­Legal and Evidentiary Basis for Holding Big Oil

186 IN D EX

Smoke and Fumes (continued ) Accountable for the Climate Crisis (Center for International Environmental Law), 124–125 Snyder, Timothy, 21 social movements, 118, 124, 129, 130–136, 172n73. See also action, immediate; individual agency, responsibility, and rights; solidarity; strikes and demonstrations sociopo­liti­cal situation. See po­liti­cal leaders and policies soil carbon sequestration, 99, 102–103 solar energy: China and, 156n36; cost of, 67, 68, 132; increased use of, 92, 157n36, 161n16. See also electricity grids solar radiation management (SRM), 9, 103, 163n40 solidarity, 47, 51, 52, 83, 158n53. See also dignity and re­spect; re­spect and dignity; social movements Southern Com­pany, 152n40 sovereign externalization: fairness and, 54–57; health and environmental costs and, 64–65, 167n28; historical responsibility and, 31–34; international inequalities and responsibilities and, 44–54, 72; ordinary costs and, 47–48; risk structure and, 104; unilateral coercion and, 51–52. See also externalization; wrongful imposition arguments space gaps, 150n25. See also international inequalities and responsibilities “Special Report on 1.5” (Global Warming of 1.5°C), 7, 94–95, 98–99, 101 steam engine, 54–55 Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), 126, 139–140 stock market, 132 Stokes, Leah Cardamore, 117, 120, 125 storms, 20, 62, 72, 74. See also coastal flooding; floods strikes and demonstrations, 121, 134 strip mining, 65 subsidies, fossil fuel: competitiveness and, 131; consumption versus production, 126; corruption and, 168n31; IMF and, 155n20, 167n28;

microgrids and, 66; noncarbon competitiveness and, 67, 124; renewable energy tax credits versus, 168n28; US leadership and, 134; world total in 2015, 64, 123 Suess, Hans E., 18 “supermajor” investor-­owned firms, 122 “tapering,” 134 temperature rise: carbon bud­get and, 70; CDR and, 95; cumulative emissions and, 9; methane and, 79; net zero emissions and, 92, 96; “polar enhancement” of, 155. See also 1.5°C rise; overshoots; 2°C rise temporal externalization, 108, 114 thermal power, 158n49 Thirty Years War, 21 threats, unlimited, 17–23. See also tipping points Thucydides, 51, 151n38 Thunberg, Greta, generation of, 90–91 Thwaites Glacier, 111–112; 147n49, 158n57, 164n50 time, 3, 26, 76, 115, 150n25 tipping points: action now and, 86–87; cascades of, 24–25, 115; CDR and, 111; date-­of-­last-­opportunity and, 76; ­future generations and, 23–26, 75–76; generational and international responsibilities to ­future and, 75–76; irreversible changes and, 113–114; Louisiana sediment cores and, 147n48; scientists and, 58. See also date-­of-­last-­opportunity; reversible and irreversible changes; threats, unlimited tobacco companies, 124–128 Total (com­pany), 132 Totten Glacier, 112–113; 164n53 Transocean, 122–123 transparency, 131, 134. See also deceptions, lies, and secrecy transportation, 61, 102 trees, 99–100 Trump administration, 56, 123, 131, 133, 134 2°C rise, 7, 63, 77–78, 92, 94–95, 126, 168n31, 170n42. See also temperature rise

IN D EX 187

unconditional duties, 17–18 understanding. See knowledge; science unilateral coercion, 51–52 United Kingdom, 135 United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), 126; fossil fuel interests and, 131 United States: approach to climate change of, 56; bank loans and, 128; cumulative emissions of, 69–70, 161n9; fairness and, 57; foreign policy and, 172–173n76; fossil fuel combustion and, 118; fossil fuel interests and, 61–62, 123, 127, 134; generational responsibility and, 35; NDCs and, 105; Paris Agreement (2018) and, 30, 134; po­liti­cal power and, 131; sovereign externalization and, 51–52, 57; “supermajor” investor-­owned firms and, 122. See also India; international inequalities and responsibilities; international negotiations; po­liti­cal leaders and policies; sovereign externalization unraveling of civilization, 21, 146n36 US Capitol insurrectionists, 20 utilities, 7–8, 52, 121–122, 124–125, 152n40, 167n26 Verkuijl, Cleo, 126, 170n42 Victor, David G., 155n31 vio­lence, 16, 20, 172n73 Volk, Tyler, 162n31

WAIS (West Antarctic Ice Sheet), 59, 78, 81, 85, 111–112, 147n47, 164n52 Wallace-­Wells, David, 91, 120, 125 waste, reduction of, 66–67 ­water: as alternative energy source, 110; BECCS and, 101; CDR and, 96; coal and, 65; fossil fuel interests and, 121; “green” hydrogen and, 125; India and, 72; population growth and, 100; Totten Glacier and, 112. See also agriculture and agribusiness; sea-­level rise Watt, James, 54 Weisbach, David, 109 Wenar, Leif, 134 West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), 59, 78, 81, 85, 111–112, 147n47, 164n52 wetland draining, 5 “Where Has All the Oil Gone? BP Branding and the Discursive Elimination of Climate Change Risk” (Doyle), 170n45 wildfires, 7, 99 Willcock, Simon, 164n56 wind energy, 38, 68, 92, 120, 156, 156n36, 161n16. See also electricity grids ­women, 71 World War II, 64 Worringham, Charles, 158n49 wrongful imposition arguments, 36, 43–47, 55, 72, 73, 114, 150nn24 and 27, 162n40. See also burdens; costs; sovereign externalization “wrong person” objection, 34–35

A NOTE ON THE T YPE

This book has been composed in Adobe Text and Gotham. Adobe Text, designed by Robert Slimbach for Adobe, bridges the gap between fifteenth- and sixteenth-century calligraphic and eighteenth-century Modern styles. Gotham, inspired by New York street signs, was designed by Tobias Frere-Jones for Hoefler & Co.